FOI Reference: FOI/2022/4202
You asked
Please provide the number of post-mortems carried out in the UK broken down by ethnic group as a percentage of deaths reported to coroner for Birmingham and London. I would like this data for the last 10 years please.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry
We are responsible for the production of mortality data for England and Wales, this is driven by information collected from the death certificate at death registration. National Records Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) are responsible for statistics pertaining to Scotland and Northern Ireland. They can be contacted at foi@nrscotland.gov.uk and info@nisra.gov.uk respectively.
Unfortunately, we do not hold the analysis you have requested. To create this data would require complex data linkage of the ethnicity data taken from Census with mortality data, alongside extensive disclosure control which would require high statistical skill and judgement. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Public Authorities are not obligated to create information in order to respond to requests.
However, we do have the following outputs by ethnicity, but these do not include post-mortem figures: Mortality from leading causes of death by ethnic group, England and Wales and a user requested dataset COVID deaths for Wales by ethnicity.
We could potentially produce a user requested data set which is available to order from the HALE Customer Services team. However, due to disclosure controls we would need to aggregate the data to 5-level ethnicity categories as opposed to the detailed 18 categories. We may also need to look at a regional output of West Midlands as opposed to Birmingham.
All user requested data sets are subject to disclosure control, legal frameworks, resource and agreement to costs, where appropriate.
Should you wish to discuss this option further please contact our Health Data desk at: Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.