You asked

Please provide any statistical information you have on the Suicide rates in the St Helens or Merseyside Borough for the last ten years.

I am aware that the Suicide rate in St Helens is higher than the national average, however if possible I would like to know how many of those people who had committed suicide, had previously been through the Care System.

We said

Thank you for your request.

Suicide data by local authority can be found in the following link which is published as part of our annual Suicides in the UK release. Table 1 here provides the number of deaths in St. Helens since 2002 and Table 2 provides the rate of suicide in rolling three-year aggregates to ensure reliable rates can be produced.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/suicidesbylocalauthority

We are unable to identify those who had been through the care system as the data we hold is based on information at death registration. This is limited to what is recorded on the death certificate by a doctor or information about the cause and circumstances of the death provided by a coroner.

We can provide the number of suicides per year by key variables such as age, sex and geographical area. 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, where appropriate). If you wish to discuss your data requirements in more detail you can contact the Mortality Analysis team at mortality@ons.gov.uk.