FOI reference: FOI-2025-3209
You asked
I would like to know the numbers of unexplained deaths in the city of Gloucester for each year from 1990 to present day. If possible I would like to know the sex/gender, the location of the city, and the date/month of each being first reported/recorded.
We said
Thank you for your request.
A higher aggregation of the information you have requested is available from our explorable dataset available on our NOMIS webservice.
However, due to the risk of personal identification, figures for a specific city cannot be extracted from the system. We are also unfortunately unable to disclose this data via FOI. 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.
As regards use of the NOMIS webservice to obtain similar data to that requested, please see the following details.
Data are available by year of registration. Data in NOMIS is only available from 2013 to 2024.
Instructions for use of this service:
Select geography (Region)
Select gender (male / female)
Select rates (deaths)
Select the ICD10 code for the underlying cause of death required
Select format (Excel or CSV, for example)
ICD 10 codes for the causes mentions are:
- R95 Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
- R96 Other sudden death, cause unknown
- R98 Unattended death
- R99 Other ill-defined and unspecified causes of mortality
- O95 Obstetric death of unspecified cause
Further aggregations of information can be created a custom output. For example, information on the number of unexplained deaths registered between 1990 and 2025 by sex, region and month of registration along with other special extracts and tabulations of mortality data for England and Wales are available to order (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs. Please note, data for death registered in 2025 will be provisional. Such enquiries can be made to: Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.