FOI Reference: FOI/2022/4313
You asked
Please provide death statistics (including cause of death) for second generation migrants (people born in the UK to a migrant parent) from 2001 onwards.
If you don't collect, why not? And how can you do this in future? Are you planning to differentiate death statistics by migrant status?
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
Our mortality data are taken from information collected at the point of death registration.
The following information is provided at the point of death registration:
- Details supplied by the doctor when certifying a death, for example, whether the body was seen after death, cause of death, when the deceased was last seen alive and whether a post-mortem was carried out
- Details supplied by the informant to the registrar, for example, occupation of deceased, sex, usual address, date and place of birth, marital status, date of death and place of death
- Details supplied by a coroner to the registrar following investigation, for example, cause of death (following post-mortem), place of accident (following inquest); in the case of deaths certified after inquest, the coroner supplies the registrar with all the particulars that would have been supplied by the informant
- Details derived from information supplied by one of the other three sources, for example, age of deceased is derived from date of birth and coded cause of death.
Unfortunately, parents' country of birth is not recorded as part of the death registration process. Further information on death registration is available in our User guide to mortality statistics.
Therefore this information is not held.
Whilst we can offer mortality extracts by the deceased's country of birth, this would not reflect the status of their migration to England or Wales.
We can also offer mortality data linked to ethnicity by using data from the 2011 Census which we can link to ONS mortality data, however again this would not reflect their status as a second-generation migrant, as it would only hold self-described ethnicity on the Census. .
At present, there is no data feed that would allow us to accurately reflect second generation migrant status in our collection of mortality data.