You asked
Please can you provide me with the total number of suicides broken down by month of the year for each of the past 5 years, including in particular those figures from 2020.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Please see the following publication: Suicides in England and Wales: 2019 registrations. This provides registered deaths in England and Wales from suicide analysed by sex, age, area of usual residence of the deceased and suicide method. Data is available from 2019 to 2011.
Unfortunately, we do not currently hold a monthly breakdown of this data and would be unable to provide this for you in answer to your FOI request. In order to fulfil this request, we would need use a high level of statistical skill and judgement in order to create a bespoke analysis. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Public Authorities are not obligated to create information in order to respond to requests. We therefore consider this to be information not held.
However, the information you have requested may be available to commission as bespoke analysis. Such services would be subject to legal frameworks, disclosure controls, resources and agreement of costs. If you would like to request this bespoke dataset, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk to discuss your enquiry further. Please note, there will be a charge for this work which would be subject to our charging policy.
We are unable to begin formally reporting on suicide deaths occurring in 2020 until late 2020 or early 2021.
Deaths by suicide require an inquest, where a coroner must investigate the death. The time taken to complete an inquest causes a lag between the date the death occurred and the date the death is registered, referred to as a registration delay. Registration delays for deaths caused by suicide tend to be 5 to 6 months on average.
We do produce provisional quarterly suicide data for England in our Quarterly suicide death registrations in England: 2001 to 2019 registrations and Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) to Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2020 provisional data. Table 1 in this publication includes deaths registered in 2020 broken down by month, up until June 2020. Please note that due to the registration delay described above, most of these deaths would have occurred in 2019.