You asked:
I would be very grateful for your help with the following request for information under the FOI act.
Cause of death (as issued by the coroner)
For all prisoners dying in prison
From natural causes
Over the last five years
Please note, I would like the cause of death as issued on the certificate of cause of death or identified at inquest (eg Lung Cancer, Myocardial Infarction or Pneumonia rather than 'natural causes').
Would it be possible to have the cause of death, year of death and coroner court responsible.
We said:
Thank you for your enquiry.
Our mortality statistics are compiled using the information provided on the death certificate. Cause of death is coded using the International Classification of Diseases, version 10 (ICD-10).
We do not publish the data you have requested. It would be possible to produce an ad-hoc table for cause of death by ICD-10 chapter, for deaths to natural causes that occurred in a prison and were certified by a coroner over the last five years. However, due to the small number of deaths that occur in prison under these circumstances, we are unable to provide the precise cause of death, as this would be disclosive. We are also unable to provide information on the coroner court responsible, as this information is not available on the death certificate. Instead, we could provide a separate table showing the number of deaths to natural causes that occurred in prison and were certified by a coroner in the last five years, by region in which the death occurred.
If this is something you are interested in, special extracts and tabulations of deaths data for England and Wales are available to order (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate). Such enquiries should be made to:
Vital Statistics Outputs Branch
Office for National Statistics
Segensworth Road
Titchfield
Fareham
Hampshire
PO15 5RR
Tel: +44 (0)1329 444 110
E-mail: vsob@ons.gov.uk
Data for deaths by cause, sex, age and geography for 2013 to 2016 is available through our explorable dataset: https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/query/construct/summary.asp?mode=construct&version=0&dataset=161
Further statistics for deaths that occurred in prison custody are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/safety-in-custody-quarterly-update-to-march-2017
As this information is already available to you via this route, we consider that s.21(1) applies to this request and the information does not have to be supplied under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. S.21(1) is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.