FOI Ref: FOI/2022/4440
You asked
As a Freedom of Information Request, please provide data on the registration of births. Specifically, please provide that which is available from the following:
- The proportion of births registered within 42 days.
- The number (or an estimate) of unregistered births.
- The average time from birth to complete registration.
- The number of birth registrations and birth notifications.
- Such data over time, ideally by month, from January 2018 till the most current date available at the point of production.
- If available, such data split geographically, whether that be by registration location, county, nation, or other available geographic unit
- Such data electronically, as a spreadsheet if possible.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Percentage of birth registrations within 42 days
Between 2008 and 2019, the percentage of births registered later than 42 days has ranged between 2% and 4%. In 2020, 42% of registrations were registered more than 42 days after birth and in 2021, 26% of registrations were registered more than 42 days after birth (the usual legal limit). This information can be found in the Measuring the data section of our annual release.
For more information please see our User guide to birth statistics
Annual number of birth registrations
The number of birth registrations received are published in our annual publication Live Births in England and Wales. The latest data available is 2021.
Within this publication there is a geographical breakdown of birth registrations, however by using our interactive webservice NOMIS you can obtain birth registrations annually at local authority level or by ward and MSOA level.
We have also published the following user requested data sets:
Live births by postcode sector, England and Wales: select years from 1999 to 2018
Number of live births and infant deaths, by Region and Rural Urban Area Classifications (RUAC), 2018
If this does not meet your needs, or for updates for 2020 and 2021 of the above user requested data sets, we can provide this as a bespoke request for you. To place an order for this, please contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk to discuss. Please note, bespoke analysis is subject to legal frameworks, resources, disclosure controls, and an agreement of costs in line with the ONS Charging policy.
Annual number of birth notifications and average time from birth to birth registration
We do not normally release statistics based on birth notifications, relying on the registration data as the definitive source for births data. However, during the pandemic, we used the notification data to produce provisional birth statistics for 2020 and 2021 in advance of registration based statistics, because of delays to the birth registration data. These are accessible via the following links:
Beyond these releases, we have not conducted analysis of birth notification data, nor on the average time from birth to registration in the registration data. However, we can create this as a bespoke request under our previously mentioned bespoke services.
The number (or an estimate) of unregistered births
We do not hold information on the number of unregistered births, as this would require the creation of new information involving complex data linkage between birth registration and birth notification data. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Public Authorities are not obligated to create new information to respond to requests. This information therefore is not held.