You asked
Under the Freedom of Information Act (2000), please could you provide me with a breakdown/statistic of the ethnicities and religion groups of all the people who committed suicide in the UK in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015.
We said
Thank you for your query regarding suicides by ethnic or religous group in the UK.
ONS publish an annual statistical bulletin on suicides in the UK, which is available on our website:
Mortality data held by ONS is collected from the information provided at death registration. Information on the ethnicity or religous group of the deceased is not collected at death registration and is therefore not available from this source.
Please note that the Office for National Statistics only holds data on deaths occurring in England and Wales.
Figures for Scotland can be obtained from the National Records of Scotland.
Figures for Northern Ireland can be obtained from the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency.
Special extracts and tabulations of mortality data for England and Wales are available to order (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate). Such enquiries should be made to: mortality@ons.gov.uk. We recommend that you contact the Mortality Analysis team directly in order to discuss your data requirements in more detail.
As this information is already available to you via this route ONS considers that S21(1) applies to this request and the information does not have to be supplied under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. S21(1) is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.