Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government why the abortion statistics for England and Wales for 2022 have been delayed and will not be published until April 2024.
There are no plans to publish 2023 abortion statistics for England and Wales concurrently with the 2022 statistics in April 2024. Following publication of the 2022 statistics, we will move forward with plans to publish abortion statistics for 2023.
The publication of the abortion statistics for England and Wales for 2022 has been delayed due to several operational issues. These include issues associated with moving to a new data processing system and an increase in the number of paper abortion notification forms to process.