National Statistical

Delays in registration of death by suicide can make the statistics less intuitive. David Mais explores how the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is tackling these challenges through a collaborative approach with users to help inform the future of our suicide statistics.

The ONS publishes suicide statistics as part of our statutory responsibility to provide mortality statistics.  Suicide is a highly emotive topic and we are invested in delivering high-quality, impactful statistics about it. That is why, as part of our continuous improvement work, we are reaching out for feedback on how best to present our suicide statistics.

How we publish suicide statistics

Currently, we publish our suicide statistics based on the year the death was registered, not the year when it occurred. Using registration data provides more timely and comparable figures, but can be less intuitive to users as not every death registered in a given year occurred in that year.

Registration data is more timely because of the delay caused between the date of occurrence and the date of registration following an inquest. In England and Wales, all deaths by suicide are certified by a coroner and cannot be registered until an inquest is complete. This is often a lengthy process as a coroner needs to gather evidence and make a conclusion regarding the cause of death. As such, we currently publish annual registration data relating to the previous year, whereas the occurrence data we publish has a lag of an additional year.

Recently, there has been an increase in registration delays which has meant that the percentage of suicides occurring within a given registration year has reduced. In 2023 only 39% of registered suicides had a date of death that was also in 2023. This is substantially lower than in 2002 when 67% of suicides registered in 2002 also occurred in 2002.

Gathering your views

To better understand the needs of our users we have launched a short survey on our engagement platform outlining three options:

1. Continue to focus on registration data with better communication of the differences compared to occurrence data, and with clearer commentary of the impact of registration delays.
2. Include analysis and commentary for both registration and occurrence data.
3. Switch the focus of bulletins to occurrence data only. This option would involve longer lag times of approximately 18-24 months and so we will also consider whether missing occurrence data could be modelled.

Evidence-led decisions

The feedback we receive will be used to inform how we publish our suicide statistics going forward, and changes may affect the timeliness, completeness and coherence of those statistics. We will publish an anonymised summary of the responses received and continue to engage with our users.

In addition, this feedback will shape how we understand and improve mortality statistics more widely. Increased registration delays affect all death registrations, statistics and insights. One option we will explore with our users is whether we can provide a more timely and complete picture of death occurrences by adjusting for deaths that have not yet been register

Have your say

If you would like to share your views, please do so via this short questionnaire on user requirements for official suicide statistics.

The survey will close on Wednesday 18^th June 2025.

If you have questions about this user survey, please email  health.data@ons.gov.uk.

If you need support

If you are struggling to cope, please call Samaritans free on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@samaritans.org or visit  the Samaritans website to find details of the nearest branch. Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone struggling to cope, whoever they are, however they feel, whatever life has done to them. You can also contact other sources of support, such as those listed on the NHS help for suicidal thoughts webpage.

If you are a journalist covering a suicide-related issue, please consider following the Samaritans’ media guidelines on the reporting of suicide because of the potentially damaging consequences of irresponsible reporting. In particular, the guidelines advise on terminology and include links to sources of support for anyone affected by the themes in the article.