Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The purpose of the Vital Statistics for England and Wales data is to record the numbers of conceptions, live births, stillbirths, deaths and causes of death for persons in England and Wales, by gender and age. Data are available at local authority, health authority and ward level. Individual studies in the series record various parts of these data. Changes have been made over time to the way in which the Office for National Statistics (ONS) collects vital statistics data, resulting in some variation in the content of later studies in the series. Further information may be found in the Key Population and Vital Statistics reports available from the ONS web site.

During 2006, Sam Smith and colleagues at ESDS Government carried out work on various studies in the series prior to 2002, to improve the data format. The resulting files have been redeposited at the UKDA. More information is available in the documentation for the studies concerned.


The data cover vital statistics at ward level for 1988.

For the second edition (August 2006), work was carried out on the data by ESDS Government (see above), in order to produce a more user-friendly tab-delimited ASCII file. The data are also now available in Excel format.


Main Topics:

These data comprise 32 counts for each ward as follows:

• live births - total, males, females
• stillbirths - total, males, females
• deaths at all ages - total, males, females
• deaths under one year - total, males, females
• deaths, males aged 1-4 years, 5-14, 15-24, and other age groups up to 85 years and over
• deaths, females aged 1-4 years, 5-14, 15-24, and other age groups up to 85 years and over