You asked
Please could you provide the following for the years 2019 to 2021 (up to March this year) for England and Wales, broken down by month. If you also hold this information for Scotland and Northern Ireland, please provide this data separately.
- The number of suicides recorded by date registered, broken down by age and sex.
- The number of suicides recorded by date when they occurred, broken down by age and sex.
- Your report due to be published in September 2021 on suicide rates in 2020.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
Unfortunately, we do not hold analysis showing the number of deaths involving Suicide in England and Wales from 2019 to 2021 by age, sex, date of occurrence or date registered, and by month.
However, the information you have requested for 2019 may be available to commission as bespoke analysis. Such services would be subject to legal frameworks, disclosure controls, resources and agreement of costs. If you would like to request this bespoke dataset, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk to discuss your enquiry further. Please note, there may be a charge for this work which would be subject to our charging policy.
2020 data will be available to commission as bespoke analysis once the data are finalised and have been published in September 2021.
The report you have requested is exempt from disclosure as we intend to publish this in the future. Section 22(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, whereby information is exempt from release if there is a view to publish the information in the future. Furthermore, as a central government department and producer of official statistics, we need to have the freedom to be able to determine our own publication timetables. This is to allow us to deal with the necessary preparation, administration and context of publications. It would be unreasonable to consider disclosure when to do so would undermine our functions.
This exemption is subject to a public interest test. We recognise the desirability of information being freely available and this is considered by ONS when publication schedules are set in accordance with the Code of Practice for Statistics. The need for timely data must be balanced against the practicalities of applying statistical skill and judgement to produce the high quality, assured data needed to inform decision-making. If this balance is incorrectly applied, then we run the risk of decisions being based on inaccurate data which is arguably not in the public interest. This will have an impact on public trust in official statistics in a time when accuracy of official statistics is more important to the public than ever before.
In case it is of interest, please see the following analysis we have available so far for suicides registered in 2020:
We produce provisional suicide data for England on a quarterly basis. This publication provides deaths that have been registered from January to September of 2020. This is for deaths registered in 2020, and due to the registration delay described above, many of these deaths will have occurred in 2019. The data in this publication is broken down by age and region. This publication will be updated with suicides registered in the final quarter of 2020 at the end of April 2021.
Annual suicide statistics are available via the following link: Suicides in the UK. Our statistics are based on the date of registration. Therefore, our annual release is based on 2019 death registrations. Registrations for earlier years are also available in the "previous versions link".
The following publication may also be of interest: Suicides in England and Wales. This provides Suicide deaths by registration date from 2011 to 2019.
Our Suicides in the UK publication and our Suicides in England and Wales publication will be updated with 2020 data once the data are finalised in September 2021.