About the excessive number of deaths in 2015 in the UK

A number of newspapers have recently carried a story about a marked increase in the number of deaths in the UK, in particular during the year 2015. This is even being discussed in newspapers in other countries… The story was rebutted quite violently by the government, with various claims of shoddy statistics and politically biased inferences.

Having a passing interest in social and demographic statistics, I was curious to see if the data supported the theory – I’ve often said that a single number is meaningless unless you look at it over time, and in comparison with other measurements. More about this later on in the article…

Using official data from data.gov.uk, I played around with the data to try and add some context behind it.

First, a summary:

There is, indeed, a marked increase in the number of deaths in 2015, particularly in the 75+ age groups. However, and this is where some journalists have been lazy, the deaths in that age group decrease in 2016 compared to 2015, although there is an overall increase across all age groups from 2013 to 2016.

One question to ask is what do the number of deaths mean as a proportion of the total cohort for each age group ? We know the population is increasing, and each year a possible change in the number of people reaching the relevant age groups… I’ll leave that analysis till later.

The data I procured shows the deaths per week, per year, per age group. As the number for the 75+ group was the most significant, I looked at it in more detail:

What jumps out immediately is the huge spike in deaths in the first 17 weeks of 2015. Looking at data from other years, the mortality rates seem to track closely year on year, but 2015 seems to have been exceptional. If we look at 2015 vs 2016:

We see that 2016 does not show this spike, and tracks more closely to 2014.

So the real question is: What happened to our elderly population in the early weeks of 2015? Was it cold weather or a flu epidemic ? Maybe you can have a go at finding out…

My conclusion is that there may or may not be a correlation between the cuts in the NHS, the social care budget and the increasing number of deaths over a number of years. I don’t think my analysis here can answer that question… but I think it reveals a far more intriguing story – what was killing more old people in the early weeks of 2015 ?