Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to improve the collection and publication of national data on drowning incidents, including demographic information, to inform targeted prevention policies.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

Please see the letter attached from the National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority.

The Lord Kamall

House of Lords

London

SW1A 0PW

22 September 2025

Dear Lord Kamall,

As Acting National Statistician, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking what steps are being taken to improve the collection and publication of national data on drowning incidents, including demographic information, to inform targeted prevention policies (HL10639).

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) produces mortality statistics using information provided on death certificates. The ONS codes cause of death using the International Cause of Death (ICD-10). The ICD-10 codes for accidental drowning and submersion are W65 to W74.

The ONS publishes statistics on mortality by specific cause each year, in our Deaths

registered summary statistics [1]. Numbers of deaths for 2024 were published on 20 May 2025, and age-standardised mortality rates will be published on 9 October 2025. Table 3 in that publication presents deaths by specific causes, including accidental drowning and submersion, by sex and five-year age bands. Those published 2024 figures by age and sex are summarised with wider age bands in the table below.

The ONS is currently exploring methods to improve the timeliness of our mortality statistics. We launched a consultation earlier this year asking users about the value of reporting death occurrences rather than registrations for suicide statistics [2], and the same questions are being considered for wider mortality outputs too. This includes assessing the accuracy of “nowcasting”: estimating the number of recent death occurrences, by cause, using factors such as the number registered in the past week and trends in registration delays for that cause.

Death certification reform was also implemented in September 2024 [3], which included adding an ethnicity field to the death certificate for the first time in England and Wales. This aims to improve future reporting of deaths by ethnicity and will enable us to produce further demographic breakdowns in future.

Yours sincerely,

Emma Rourke

Table 1: Number of deaths registered by sex, age group and ONS short list of cause of death code, 2024, England and Wales

Notes:

1. Figures are for deaths registered rather than deaths occurred. For more information see our Impact of registration delays publication [4].

2. Figures include non-residents.

3. Based on underlying cause of death.

4. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) short list for cause of death is based on a standard tabulation list developed by the ONS, in consultation with the Department of Health (now the Department of Health and Social Care, DHSC). For more information about the codes included, see our User guide to mortality statistics [5].

5. Figures for deaths aged under 1 year exclude deaths under 28 days, which are registered with separate neonatal death certificate from which it is not possible to assign an underlying cause of death. For more information see the childhood mortality section of our User guide to mortality statistics.

[1]https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/d eathsregisteredsummarystatisticsenglandandwales

[2]https://consultations.ons.gov.uk/external-affairs/user-requirements-for-official-suicide-statistics/

[3]https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/death-certification-reform-and-the-introduction-ofmedical-examiners

[4]https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/im pactofregistrationdelaysonmortalitystatisticsinenglandandwales/latest

[5]https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/methodolo gies/userguidetomortalitystatisticsjuly2017#ons-short-list-of-cause-of-death