If 200 people in England and Wales dropped dead one week from a mysterious unknown cause, you’d think our supposedly nanny state would learn about it right away.

Not necessarily. Each year around 10,000 deaths in England and Wales go unrecorded for months because they are referred to coroners. Unlike in Scotland, the fact of death does not need to be registered until the inquest has recorded a verdict, perhaps six or nine months later. Experts say the time lag blights official statistics, with serious consequences for public policy, including the risk of missing a nascent epidemic such as a new variant of flu.

Professor Sheila Bird, a senior scientist at the Medical Research Council’s Biostatistics Unit, says that the lack of timely information about people dropping dead is hampering policy on recreational drugs. For example, there was a 30% drop in the number of cocaine-related deaths in 2009, which the Office for National Statistics didn’t know about until 2011. The fall was apparently related to the use of the synthetic stimulant mephedrone, which Bird says has proved less lethal than cocaine. But the government didn’t know this when it banned the new drug in 2010.

Delays in death registration also pose problems for a long-term study into the effectiveness of handing out the heroin antidote naloxone to addicts leaving prison. ‘If people are dying, I need to know now, not in six months,’ says Bird. ‘It’s farcical in an electronic age.’

The Royal Statistical Society reckons that the problem could be solved with a trivial piece of legislation, bringing the law in England and Wales into line with that of Scotland, which requires registration of the fact of death within eight days. However, ministers don’t seem interested. Partly it’s the old problem of asking one department (the Home Office) to legislate in areas affecting the Ministry of Justice (coroners) and the Department of Health.

I also wonder whether ministers are nervous about dealing with issues of mortality. ‘Death’s better under the Conservatives’ is not a vote-winning slogan, even if true.

Michael Cross is Gazette news editor

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