Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential implications for his policies on suicide prevention of the ONS's estimates of suicide among higher education students, published in January 2018; and if he will make a statement.

As laid out in ‘Fourth progress report of the cross-government outcomes strategy to save lives’, the Department asked Public Health England (PHE) to lead a project to analyse and publish data on student suicides in England. PHE worked with the Office for National Statistics to link higher education data to suicide mortality data, for the period 2000/01 to 2016/17. The report ‘Estimating suicide among Higher Education students, England and Wales’ was published in June 2018.

In January 2019, we published the first Cross-Government Suicide Prevention Workplan, setting out an ambitious programme across national and local government and the National Health Service. It includes a commitment to analyse the suicide rates of people at university to explore any lessons to be learned and increase awareness of suicide risk and mental wellbeing in universities.