FOI Ref: FOI/2022/3983
You asked
Please supply 2021 Mortality Statistics broken down by cause of death, sex and age.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
This information will be published in July 2022 as part of the Deaths Registered Series, this is to allow the inclusion of late registrations, which are deaths that have been referred to Coroner for investigation. More information on late registrations can be found in our Impact of registration delays on mortality statistics
This data will also become available on the NOMIS webservice with a full ICD-10 code breakdown available in our 21st Century Mortality publication.
As such, the information you have requested for 2021 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.
We can produce your table as a bespoke request using provisional data, but we must caution this data will be subject to change and will not match the Death Registrations data or NOMIS Extract when published in July 2022.
However, if you would like to request this custom dataset, such enquiries would fall outside of the Freedom of Information regime and would be subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs.
Please contact the Customer Services Team on Health.Data@ons.gov.uk for further information.