Reference: FOI-2024-1946
You asked
Regarding those over the age of 55 claiming universal credit and have:
- taken out their pension income after finding out that their pension money is being stolen off of them and;
- due to the stress of not being able to afford to live without their pension income being added to their universal credit payment have:
1. Taken their own life or
2. Have staved to death due to having to chose between heating and eating or
3. Died from hypothermia again due to having to chose between heating and eating
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
Our mortality data comes from the information collected at death registration. All the conditions mentioned on the death certificate are coded using the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10). From all of these causes an underlying cause of death is selected using ICD-10 coding rules.
The underlying cause of death is defined by WHO as:
the disease or injury that initiated the train of events directly leading to death, or
the circumstances of the accident or violence that produced the fatal injury
At the Office for National Statistics (ONS), we use the term "due to" to refer to the underlying cause of a death and the term "involving" where a cause is mentioned anywhere on the death certificate. Under the ICD-10 coding rules, T68 Hypothermia cannot be an underlying cause of death, it can only be as a secondary or contributory cause of death.
Further, please note we do not hold specific information regarding the circumstances of the death. Therefore, we cannot directly attribute deaths to lack of household heating for example.
However, the following information are available and relevant to your query:
In terms of request 1, we regularly publish suicide statistics for England and Wales. Deaths caused by suicide are manually coded by a team of expert mortality coders based on information provided by the coroner. However, unfortunately, we do not hold data stating whether or not the deceased was in receipt of benefits, such as Universal Credit.
In terms of request 2 and 3, annual data for cause code E40-E46 (Malnutrition), W93 (Exposure to excessive cold of man-made origin) and X31 (Exposure to excessive natural cold) as the underlying causes of death are available to download from the NOMIS webservice for England and Wales. To explore the number of deaths that can be attributed to these cause codes you can use our explorable dataset. To use our explorable dataset on the left hand side there are a number of options you can select:
Geography, select the geography you want the data for
Date, select the years you want the data for, there is data available from 2013 onwards
Age, select the age range you are interested in, if you want all ages select "total (all ages)"
Rates, number of deaths is default, rates can then be selected
Sex, select either sex or "Total" for both
Underlying cause (for example, the malnutrition cause codes E40-E46)
Once you have made your selections on the left-hand side select "Download data" and an excel data download will be created for you.
However, as we have mentioned, these data cannot be broken down by whether the deceased was in receipt of universal credit, as that information is not collected on the death certificate.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) produces National and Official benefits statistics, and may have some further insights. Their contact information can be found on their website.