Suicides by occupation in the UK

You asked

1. Please state the number of suicides for the following occupations:

   a) Police officers (sergeant and below)
   b) Paramedics
   c) Prison service officers (below principal officer)
   d) National government administrative occupations
   e) Local government administrative occupations
   f) Care workers and home carers
   

   for the following financial years:

   2010-11
   2011-12
   2012-13
   2013-14
   2014-15
   2015-16
   2016-17
   

2. Please state the estimated rate of suicide per 100,000 population for the professions above and include breakdowns for the financial years above.

3. If you hold this information for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and can provide some or all of it within the time allocation provided by the FOIA, then I hereby request the information specified in 1 & 2 for those countries (in that respective order of priority).

We said

Thank you for your query regarding mortality statistics. You asked us to provide the number of deaths from suicide, in addition to age-standardised rates, for a number of occupations including police officers (sergeant and below), paramedics, prison service officers (below principle officer), national government administrative occupations, local government administrative occupations, care workers and home carers. You asked for the data to be provided for financial years from 2010-11 to 2016-17. You requested the data to be provided for England and Wales in addition to Scotland and Northern Ireland. Please note we hold data for England and Wales only. Mortality data for Scotland can be requested from National Records of Scotland; for Northern Ireland the data can be requested from Northern Ireland Research and Statistics Agency.

Information on mortality statistics by cause of death can be obtained from the Mortality Analysis team. Special extracts and tabulations of mortality data for England and Wales, including the calculation of mortality rates for specific causes, 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, or at the above address. We recommend that you contact the Mortality Analysis team directly in order to discuss your data requirements in more detail.

As this information 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.