General Register Office (GRO)

Supplier information 

The General Register Office holds records of births, deaths, marriages, civil partnerships, stillbirths and adoptions in England and Wales.

Legal basis for sharing data

Civil Registration Data for England and Wales, including NHS numbers where available, is shared by the Registrar General with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) under s42(1) and s42(2) of the Statistics and Registration Service Act (SRSA) 2007.

Ethical scrutiny

ONS statisticians complete an ethical assessment of all proposed uses of a data source before work begins, and before they are given permission to access the data by the ONS Information Asset Owners (IAO). IAOs are senior ONS officials who are responsible for data sources, including protecting confidentiality and ensuring appropriate use.

For some new uses, notably where there may be more challenging ethical concerns, ONS statisticians will seek advice and ethical approval from the National Statistician’s Data Ethics Advisory Committee (NSDEC). Committee members have relevant expertise, provide scrutiny and challenge, and crucially, are independent.

Ethical scrutiny often involves exploring the balance between any data protection risks and the public good that could come from the new work. Most importantly, this scrutiny helps the ONS to ensure that we consider carefully whether we should produce a new statistic or not.

Minutes are published so the committee's views and approvals are transparent and available for the public to see. More information on the ethics self-assessment tool used by ONS researchers, and the NSDEC, can be found on the UK Statistics Authority's website.

Links to relevant NSDEC minutes are included for each dataset.

Data protection

Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) are completed for all uses of data where there are inherent risks for processing personal data, for example, when processing large volumes of personal data or when processing personal data of a sensitive nature. The DPIA ensures appropriate controls are in place to minimise risks and to provide assurance around the safety of the data.

Access to data held within the ONS Data Access Platform (DAP) is only granted to security-cleared ONS researchers on a case-by-case basis. This is done through a request process, which provides a business justification, authorised by the ONS IAO with advice from the Security and Information Management team.

Access is given via a “project space”, which includes only the data required to carry out the analysis that has been approved, and only to the users who require access to those data. Users are not permitted to access direct identifiers (such as name, address, date of birth, or sex) for the purposes of analysis. Access to identifiers is limited to a smaller number of staff who are specially trained and only for the purposes of data linkage. These staff are not involved in analysis or statistical production so there is a separation of duties between data linkers and data analysts.

Birth registrations data include all births registered in England and Wales. The registration of births is a service carried out by the Local Registration Service in partnership with the General Register Office (GRO) in England and Wales and is a legal requirement.

Uses

Birth registrations data are used to produce national statistics on births in England and Wales, including live births, still births, fertility rates, conceptions, birth characteristics, births by parent characteristics, and baby names. The data are also used to support census quality assurance and population statistics and the relationship between employment and health conditions, treatments and service use. Read more about the administrative data used in the census in our Administrative data used in Census 2021, England and Wales methodology.

Additional information about ethical scrutiny

The relevant National Statistician's Data Ethics Advisory Committee (NSDEC) minutes for uses of this dataset are the NSDEC minutes for March 2022 and the NSDEC minutes for August 2023.

Data minimisation

The complete birth registrations dataset is required, rather than just a sample, because it is (in theory) a census of all births. This means the statistics are more accurate than statistics based on surveys that suffer from sampling error.

Examples of impact

Local authorities and other government departments use birth statistics for planning and resource allocation. Other users include academics, demographers, health researchers, charities, Eurostat, and the United Nations. The media also report on trends and statistics. The Office for National Statistics’ (ONS's) birth data are also used as a component of our population statistics, which are used extensively throughout government for the planning and provision of funding and services.

Further information

There is more information in our User guide to birth statistics.

Death registrations data include all deaths registered in England and Wales. The registration of deaths is a service carried out by the Local Registration Service in partnership with the General Register Office (GRO) in England and Wales and is a legal requirement.

Uses

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) requires information from death registrations to produce national statistics and to support statistical research and analysis to fulfil our statutory functions. This includes enabling data linkage to produce national and official population statistics, including weekly provisional statistics on deaths in England and Wales, death registrations summary tables, and deaths registered by usual area of residence.

The ONS uses mortality data to:

• produce population estimates and population projections, both national and subnational
• develop the Statistical Population Datasets (SPDs) – this means that estimates of the usually resident population down to small areas will be produced from a new methodology
• produce life expectancy estimates
• quality assure census estimates
• report on social and demographic trends
• provide information on public health issues such as the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic
• conduct health analyses
• further analyse mortality (for example, life expectancies and causes of death, including deaths from certain infections and drug-related deaths)
• further analyse infant mortality where infant deaths are linked to their corresponding birth record to allow more detailed analyses on characteristics (for example, age of parents, birthweight, and whether the child was born as part of a multiple birth)
• exploring the relationship between employment and health conditions, treatments and service use

You can read more about the administrative data used in the census in our Administrative data used in Census 2021, England and Wales methodology. You can also read more about the quality of death registrations data against the five European Statistical System (ESS) quality dimensions in our Administrative sources used to develop the Statistical Population Dataset for England and Wales: 2016 to 2021 article. This includes how SPDs will form part of the evidence base for the National Statistician's Recommendation in 2023 (PDF, 248 KB) on the future of population, migration, and social statistics in England and Wales.

Additional information about ethical scrutiny

The relevant National Statistician's Data Ethics Advisory Committee (NSDEC) minutes for uses of this dataset are the NSDEC minutes for November 2020 to January 2021, NSDEC minutes for March 2022 and the NSDEC minutes for August 2023.

Data minimisation

The complete death registrations dataset is required to produce official mortality statistics.

Examples of impact

External users of mortality statistics include the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), the Cabinet Office, and the UK Health Security Agency, as well as devolved bodies such as Welsh Government and NHS Wales. These organisations use the figures to inform policy decisions, monitor the health of the population, and measure progress against goals such as reducing stillbirth and neonatal mortality rates.

Other public sector organisations such as the police force and the Home Office are interested in figures on external causes of death such as homicides (assault). The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) feeds mortality figures into statistical models for calculating pensions and benefits. Local authorities also use mortality figures to aid planning and resource allocation.

Private sector organisations such as banks, insurance companies, and investment companies are particularly interested in deaths by single year of age and region, as this information feeds into risk estimation models. Internationally, organisations such as Eurostat, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations (UN) Statistics Division use our mortality statistics, for example to monitor progress towards global indicators as part of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

Further information

There is more information in our User guide to mortality statistics.

You can read about our Mortality statistics in England and Wales quality and methodology information (QMI).