You asked
FOI/2021/2299
I would like a copy of all deaths by suicide from 23rd March 2020 to 22nd March 2021
I would like to see evidence of who gave the ONS the instruction to stop publishing 'death by suicide' data or be informed of the reason why you chose to do so. Suicide data used to be published every 3 months.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
Unfortunately, we would be unable to supply a copy of all deaths by suicide from 23 March 2020 to 22 March 2021, as this is considered personal information. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) renders it an offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board for statistical purposes that would identify an individual or a body corporate. As we are prohibited by law from publishing statistics in which individuals can be identified, we find that Section 44 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies. Section 44 is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.
However, we produce provisional suicide data for England on a quarterly basis, with the latest update including deaths from October to December 2020, which was released in April 2021. The publication explains that most suicides require an inquest, where a coroner must investigate the cause of death. The amount of time taken to hold an inquest causes a lag between the date the death occurred and the date the death is registered.
We refer to this as a registration delay and registration delays for deaths caused by suicide tend to be five to six months on average. Because our data is based on death registrations, this delay means that most deaths recorded for 2020 so far would have occurred in 2019. More detailed information can be found in the publication.
Our next annual suicides publication, Suicide in England and Wales, is scheduled for release in September 2021, which will include aggregated totals of 2020 data.
There has been no instruction to stop the publication of suicide data.