You asked
Please can you tell me if you hold data on the number of infants abandoned within the first week of life in England and Wales, from 2002 to 2014?
If you hold this data then please can you provide me with this information for the period 2002 to 2014.
Please provide your answer in the form of a break-down, year-by-year.
Please could you also provide me with the definition of “abandoned” which you use to compile this data.
We said
The ONS does not hold specific information on the number of infants abandoned within the first week of life in England and Wales. The Office for National Statistics is responsible for publishing police recorded crime data and these are supplied to us in aggregate form by police forces via the Home Office. While it is not possible to provide the specific figures you have requested, such cases of child abandonment are included in the statistics, but they form part of a broader offence classification and cannot be disaggregated in the data that ONS hold.
Until 2011/12 the offence you have described would have been included as part of the offence ‘abandoning a child under the age of two years’. This offence classification was replaced on 1st April 2012, and from this date is included in the offence classification ‘cruelty to children/young persons’. This information is published in Table A4 in the appendix tables of the Crime statistics, year ending June 2014 release.
Since the offence you have described is not in itself a separate crime defined by law it is unlikely that there are any official statistics available that specify the age of the child at this level of detail.
The ONS Vital Statistics Output Branch publish the number of entries on the Abandoned Children Register, maintained by the General Register Office. The attached table shows the number of abandoned children registered by the General Register Office from 2005-2013. This table is taken from the Birth Statistics: Metadata publication
The ONS Vital Statistics Output Branch can be contacted at vsob@ons.gov.uk
The General Register Office, who maintain the UK abandoned children register, may be able to help further. They can be contacted at certificate.services@gro.gov.uk