FOI reference: FOI-2026-3394
You asked
The request I am submitting is regarding suicides among the farming community in Nottinghamshire as a county and in Newark and Sherwood as a district. The period relevant to this request is between 2022 to present (2026).
How many suicides within the farming community have been recorded during the request period in the Newark and Sherwood district? And in Nottinghamshire?
What cities/towns/villages in the request area and time have recorded the most suicides within the farming community?
What year and months recorded the most suicides within the farming community for the areas and time requested?
Has there been an increase/decrease or stagnation in farmer suicides in the last 10 years?
Has there been an investigation, or do you have any data on what causes the number of suicides within the farming community?
We said
Thank you for your request.
We have published the number of deaths due to suicide by occupation of the deceased in our suicides by occupation, deaths registered in the years 2020 to 2022 data, and deaths registered in the years 2023 to 2024 provisional data. Tables 5 to 8 provide breakdowns of deaths due to suicide in the agricultural professions for England and Wales respectively, broken down by sex. For a longer time series, please see our suicides by occupation release which shows the number of suicides registered in each year from 2011 to 2021. These publications were acquired via our user requested data service at health.data@ons.gov.uk.
Occupation is reported at the time of death registration by the informant. Data on occupation is coded using the Standard Occupation Classification (SOC 2020). The recorded occupation likely reflects the deceased's main lifetime occupation or their occupation at the time of death.
In the case of defining who was a farmer, we recommend combining the following occupation groups:
Managers and proprietors in agriculture and horticulture (SOC 2010 code: 1211)
Farmers (SOC 2010 code: 5111)
Agricultural and fishing trades not elsewhere classified (SOC 2010 code: 5119)
Agricultural machinery drivers (SOC 2010 code: 8223)
Farm workers (SOC 2010 code: 9111)
Fishing and other elementary agriculture occupations not elsewhere classified (SOC 2010 code: 9119)
All deaths due to suicide are referred to a coroner. This means that we do not get informed of these deaths until the coroner has reached a verdict and registered the death, meaning the registration is delayed. More information on registration delays is available in our Impact of registration delays on mortality statistics dataset.
As we are still in the data collection period for deaths that were registered in 2025 and 2026, we have not published any information on suicides registered in these years. There are likely suicides which occurred in earlier years which have also not yet been registered.
We are unable to release the number of suicides within the farming communities of Nottinghamshire and Newark and Sherwood by year or month specifically as there is a high risk of disclosing the identity of the deceased. This is consistent with the disclosure control methodology used for births. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) renders it a criminal offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board (ONS) for statistical purposes that would identify an individual or a body corporate. As we are prohibited by law from publishing statistics in which individuals can be identified, Section 44(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.
Please note that the numbers detailed in the bespoke tabulations above cannot be used to ascertain the risk of suicide among occupations. Differences in numbers of deaths may merely reflect the underlying population structure as opposed to differences in risk. An analysis of suicide by occupations, that accounts for populations, was last published in March 2017. We are working on an update and expect it to be published in the next year.
The changing numbers of suicides among farmers involve a complex number of social factors and is unlikely to be down to a single reason. Broad reasons why an occupation may carry a high risk of suicide are discussed here: Why do some occupations have a high risk of suicide? There is also lots of research in this area, such as Malmberg et al, 1999 focused on farmers specifically, and Skegg, 2010 considering different occupational groups including farmers.