FOI Ref: FOI/2022/3997
You asked
Please supply any statistical information you have on suicide rates for anyone under the age of 18 in the Merseyside Borough for the last five years.
Please disclose the statistics of anyone under the age of 18 who has died by suicide in the Merseyside Region. Please break these regions down if possible (St Helens, Liverpool, Wirral, Sefton, Knowsley) from 2018 to 2022.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
We hold the following analysis: Suicides in England and Wales by local authority
Using the customise my data service provided within this publication, we can provide the following data:
| Geography | Geography code | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Knowsley | E08000011 | 12 | 8 | 10 |
| Liverpool | E08000012 | 37 | 39 | 54 |
| Sefton | E08000014 | 22 | 22 | 20 |
| St. Helens | E08000013 | 17 | 19 | 15 |
| Wirral | E08000015 | 26 | 22 | 39 |
Download this table Suicide registrations in England and Wales by local authority
.xls .csv
We are unable to provide any further disaggregation of this data due to the small numbers involved as it would be considered personal information. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) renders it an offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board 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, we find that Section 44(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies. Section 44(1) is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.
2021 and 2022 data
The majority of suicides require an inquest, where a coroner investigates the death. The amount of time it takes to hold an inquest causes a lag between the date of death and the date of death registration, referred to as a registration delay. Registration delays for deaths caused by suicide tend to be 5 to 6 months on average.
We do produce provisional suicide data for England on a quarterly basis, with the latest update including deaths that have been registered from July to September of 2021. This is for deaths registered in 2021, and due to the registration delay described above, most of these deaths would have occurred in 2020.
Provisional November and December 2021 data will be published in April 2022.