You asked
Please provide the all causes of death mentioned on the death certificates of all the people who have died this year.
I am particularly interested in the increasing level of death over the 5 year average that is not caused by Covid 19.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
Please see the following publication: Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, Provisional. Data is available from 2010 to 2020 within this publication, which is updated every Tuesday. This details COVID-19 deaths and respiratory deaths.
Please also see the following publication: Analysis of death registrations not involving coronavirus (COVID-19), England and Wales: 28 December 2019 to 10 July 2020. This provides exploration of trends in non-COVID-19 deaths since 2 May 2020, how they compare with the five-year average, and how the nature of deaths from 2 May to 10 July 2020 may have changed from previous years when total numbers of non-COVID-19 deaths have returned to more expected levels.
The following publication, Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales, provides provisional death registration data for England and Wales, broken down by sex, age and country. This includes deaths due to COVID-19 and leading causes of death. Data is available from July 2020 to September 2020. This publication will be updated with October data on 19 November 2020.
We would be unable to provide a full breakdown of deaths from all causes of death for January 2020 to the present date. This breakdown will be published on our website in 2021.
As such, the information you have requested is considered exempt under 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.