You asked
It would be helpful if there was one spreadsheet per year with all figures on it I.e. England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Why have England and Wales but not Scotland and NI but still have UK totals?
For instance why is there a week 53?
Perhaps you could supply me the total UK deaths for the last 10 years.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Why ONS produce mortality data for England and Wales:
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) are responsible for the production of mortality data in England and Wales and National Records Scotland (NRS) and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) are responsible for the production of mortality statistics for Scotland and Northern Ireland, as health is a devolved policy area in the United Kingdom.
In collaboration with these organisations, we have published the following dataset: Vital statistics in the UK: births, deaths and marriages. This dataset contains annual deaths occurring in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, and the UK as a whole up to 2019. Due to individual publishing timelines, analysis of UK figures for 2020 are expected to be published in January 2022.
However, please see the following link to our blog, which provides the total number of deaths in England and Wales in 2020: https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2021/01/12/counting-deaths-involving-coronavirus-a-year-in-review/
For Scottish and Northern Irish mortality data for 2020, please contact NRS and NISRA. They can be contacted at foi@nrscotland.gov.uk and info@nisra.gov.uk respectively.
Why there was a Week 53 in 2020:
We produce weekly deaths for England and Wales, this is updated every Tuesday at 09:30. This provides an insight into weekly death registration figures, aggregated by sex and age and comparisons against the weekly five-year average.
The figures presented in the 2020 weekly deaths bulletin are provisional numbers of deaths registered in the week ending 3 January (week 1). Therefore, registration week 1 began on 28 December 2019 (week 1).
The death registration data provided to ONS are not based on a week or month beginning on the 1st. In this instance 1 January 2020 was on a Wednesday. We are unable to produce and analyse mortality data from mid-week as this does not align with the timeline ONS receive mortality registration and occurrence data.
All the death certificates for the registration week have to be coded, some automatically and some manually - so to allow for processing of death registration data and then production of tables for the bulletin, it takes 11 days until we can publish the death registrations for that week. The week 53 snapshot for 2020 includes the registrations from 26 December to week ending 1 January 2021. This is why there was a Week 53 in our dataset for 2020.
Please see Impact of registration delays on mortality statistics for more information.
If you would like to discuss your request further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.