Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the withdrawal of the Learning Disabilities Mortality Review (LeDeR) report 2023 due to data quality issues; what were the specific data technicalities or defects that were not identified by NHS England or the Department of Health and Social Care; and what steps they plan to take to strengthen data collection and validation protocols during future LeDeR publications to ensure timely and reliable reporting.

We know that families and stakeholders will be frustrated by the withdrawal of the most recent 2023 Learning from Lives and Deaths of People with a Learning Disability and Autistic People (LeDeR) report, published in September 2025 by King’s College London. We apologise for the upset this has caused to families and loved ones, and we will make sure lessons are learned so that this cannot happen again. We remain committed to ensuring learning from LeDeR is shared and used to drive tangible service improvements.

The report was temporarily withdrawn after a technical issue was identified by NHS England after its publication. Some data used in the LeDeR report comes from Medical Certificate Cause of Death data. This was due to a technical issue related to a new automated process introduced in spring 2023, which meant that some of this data was not updated properly in the LeDeR dataset. This means that some data on cause of death was not included in the 2023 LeDeR report when it should have been, which has subsequently impacted some of the published analysis in the 2023 LeDeR report.

In line with ethical research and statistical practice, King’s College London has now withdrawn the report and has issued a notice setting out the reason why. An updated version is being prepared for publication in January 2026.

A correction has been applied to ensure that the specific automated processing error cannot happen again. NHS England is working with King’s College London to implement a more robust data checking protocol for the next LeDeR report, which will be an analysis of reviews of deaths for people who died in 2024 and whose deaths were notified to LeDeR in that year.