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 include, for each local authority in England and Wales: annual summary figures for 2003 for populations, births and deaths; fertility and mortality rates; comparative numbers and rates for the region and England and Wales.


Main Topics:

The data comprise five sets of tables:

• table VS1 provides a vital statistics summary (population, births, deaths, fertility and mortality rates by region for England and Wales
• table VS2 provides birth statistics (births by age of mother, number of previous children, type of establishment where birth occurred and birth weight)
• table VS3 provides mortality statistics (deaths by cause, age and sex)
• table VS4 provides vital statistics for wards (births and deaths)
• table VS4D provides deaths from selected causes by wards