You asked
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information:
Statistics concerning suicide rates per 1,000 individuals comparing religion, and if feasible by ethnicity and/or gender.
We said
Thank you for your request.
The information we hold on deaths is limited to what is recorded on the death certificate by a doctor or information about the cause and circumstances of the death provided by a coroner. We can provide the number of suicides per year by key variables such as age, sex and geographical area. Detailed information on religion and ethnicity is not generally available.
Special extracts and tabulations of mortality data for England and Wales are available to order (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate). Such enquiries should be made to: mortality@ons.gov.uk. We recommend that you contact the Mortality Analysis team directly in order to discuss your data requirements in more detail.
As the only information that can be provided is already available to you via this route, we consider that s.21(1) applies to this request and the information does not have to be supplied under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. S.21(1) is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.