Breakdown of deaths by cause of death, 2018 to 2020

You asked

​​I would like a full breakdown of the death rates in UK for the last 3 years and this is actual deaths and causes.

We said

​Thank you for your request.

We are responsible for the production of mortality data in England and Wales, this is derived using information collected from the death certificates at death registration. For Scotland and Northern Ireland statistics please contact National Records Scotland and NISRA respectively.

2018, 2019, and 2020 deaths by underlying cause:

Our NOMIS webservice provides mortality data from 2013 to 2019 by underlying cause. Please see the following instructions for using this service:

• Select the geography - England and Wales, regional or by local authority
• Select Age - All ages or 5-year age bands
• Select Gender - Total or Male/Female
• Select rates - All deaths, rates or percentage of population for example.
• Select cause of death - Please enter ICD10 codes for the causes of death that are of interest
• Select format (Excel or CSV for example)

A full ICD-10 breakdown of mortality data for 2020 is expected to be available on NOMIS later this year.

As such, a full ICD-10 breakdown of death data for 2020 is 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.

However, we have produced the following death data broken down by specific ICD-10 codes in 2020 in response to COVID-19, which may be of interest.

Please see Table 6a of the following publication, Deaths involving COVID-19, England and Wales. This provides the number of deaths involving COVID-19 by pre-existing conditions in England and Wales between March and June 2020.

Provisional monthly death registration data for England and Wales, broken down by sex, age and country are available in the following monthly publication: Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales. This publication contains data from July onwards and includes deaths due to COVID-19 and leading causes of death. Leading causes is also available on Table 11 and includes figures for the five-year average.

Death rates:

Please see the following information we have regarding death rates for each year.

We have produced a Vital statistics in the UK: births, deaths and marriages dataset, this dataset contains death rates up to 2019.

To publish this dataset ONS collaborate with N. Ireland (NISRA: Northern Island Statistical Research Agency) and Scotland (NRS: National Records Scotland) to collate headline figures for the UK. Due to individual publishing timelines, analysis of UK figures for 2020 are expected to be published January 2022. I have copied out the figures below:

We also publish annual mortality rates for England and Wales in ad hoc dataset that was published on 12January 2021: Annual deaths and mortality rates, 1938 to 2020 (provisional). The following table provides the crude mortality rates (per 100,000 population) for 2020:

Please note: 2020 mortality data is still in a provisional state so figures may change in the future as we receive new death registrations. Death registrations that were delayed due to inquests, autopsies etc, these will be added to the annual death registered series and a final annual rate for 2020 will be calculated. Finalised annual figures are expected to be published in summer 2021.

More information on how we calculate mortality rates can be found in our user guide to mortality statistics guidance.

If you would like to discuss these statistics further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk