Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the difference is between attributable deaths referring to air pollution and deaths reported on death certificates.

Long-term exposure to air pollution is understood to contribute to the risk of dying from certain conditions. The annual number of ‘attributable deaths’ associated with long-term average concentrations of pollutants is not an estimate of the number of people whose untimely death is caused entirely by air pollution. Instead, it is a way of representing the effect of air pollution across the whole population.

Causes of death on death certificates record the sequence of medical conditions and relevant events leading to, or contributing to, the death, based on the deceased's healthcare records and other available information, such as laboratory tests or post-mortem investigation. Generally, it is unusual for wider risk factors, such as exposure to air pollution, to be recorded among causes of death.