Public Body Ethnicity Data (Inclusion of Jewish and Sikh Categories)

1st reading
Wednesday 4th December 2024 Commons Chamber

Motion for leave to bring in a Bill (Standing Order No. 23)

12:36

[Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to provide that, where a public body collects data about ethnicity for the purpose of delivering public services, it must include specific “Sikh” and “Jewish” categories as options for a person’s ethnic group; and for connected purposes.

Jews and Sikhs are in the unique position of being considered both ethnic and religious groups under the Equality Act 2010. Sikhs and Jews have been legally recognised as ethnic groups for over 40 years, since the Mandla v. Dowell Lee case in 1983. The Bill would address a fundamental absurdity in the fight against discrimination and inequality, which is that we have not collected ethnicity data on Sikhs and Jews since laws on racial discrimination were first introduced nearly 60 years ago.

The Women and Equalities Committee was told in February 2018 that the Government’s race disparity audit had identified around 340 datasets across Government, but found no data on Sikhs. The only data collected on Sikhs and Jews in more recent years is religious data. However, the quality of data collected by public bodies on religion, as opposed to ethnicity, is poor, patchy and incomplete. Religion data is never used by public bodies to make decisions for the purposes of delivering public services. This makes both Jews and Sikhs invisible to policymakers, ignoring the inequality and discrimination that both groups face. That is why a specific Jewish and Sikh ethnic category is needed, and that is what this Bill will create.

This is a campaign to end the discrimination that both communities face. I campaigned for a Sikh and Jewish ethnicity tick box to be included in the 2021 census, because we know that for over 30 years, public bodies have been instructed to use the census’s ethnic groups questions to design and deliver services in compliance with equalities legislation. Given that we are talking about protected characteristics, we would expect public bodies to be instructed to routinely collect information on Sikhs and Jews, but they are not.

The then Minister with responsibility for equalities, the right hon. Member for Daventry (Stuart Andrew), wrote this to me last year:

“public bodies and decision-makers who think that their decisions may affect discrimination, harassment, or victimisation of Sikhs…should ensure that their compliance with the duty includes considerations of Sikh ethnicity.”

However, they do not, because people incorrectly argue, and assume, that data collected on religion is a suitable substitute. Those people do not understand existing practices. Religion data is rarely collected to a good standard. It excludes non-practising Sikhs and Jews, and it is not used by public bodies to monitor and reduce inequalities or provide public services. The latter is key to this argument, because Sikhs and Jews are missing from whole swathes of public data—on education, housing, crime, health, criminal justice, the public sector workforce and the ethnicity pay gap.

The Bill would allow public bodies to start systematically collecting data on Sikhs and Jews to address the discrimination and inequalities that they face, which is especially relevant as the Government have made a commitment to requiring ethnicity pay gap reporting. In presenting this Bill, I have the support of a wide range of community organisations, including the Sikh Council, 112 UK gurdwaras and organisations, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Antisemitism Policy Trust and the Community Security Trust.

I would like to provide the House with a few examples of why this Bill is so important. The pandemic shone a harsh light on the inequalities between different ethnic groups. Many experts in public health now accept that we were too slow to recognise that some ethnic groups were dying at a far higher rate than others. The Office for National Statistics belatedly started analysing covid-related deaths data by religious group where data was available, a short-term exercise that has since been discontinued. It found that Sikhs died disproportionately from covid even after adjusting for region, population density, area deprivation, household composition, socioeconomic status and a range of other economic indicators. Not only that, but it showed that Sikhs were affected at a very different rate from other predominantly south Asian groups, meaning that analysis using the existing ethnic minority categories would fail to capture any of these inequalities.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews has also recognised these arguments. British Jews died at almost twice the rate of the rest of the population, as there is a higher prevalence of certain genetic conditions among Jewish people—for example, of breast cancer in Ashkenazi Jewish women. Collecting better data will help public services to profile and respond to the community better. To address health inequalities, we need to learn from the pandemic, and we need to collect accurate data to ensure better outcomes for both these communities, based on evidence.

To give just one example that highlights the absurdity of this system, NHS Blood and Transplant does not collect data on Sikh organ donors or Sikhs requiring an organ transplant, despite the fact that for more than a decade, there has been a policy of encouraging more Sikhs to become donors. NHS Blood and Transplant does not gather the single most important data point that would allow us to improve sign-up rates among this under-represented group. It is shocking.

As Amanda Bowman, vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, wrote last year:

“Imagine you’re sitting in a hospital waiting room and have been asked to fill out a form which, among other questions, asks for your ethnicity…So which box do I tick?”

As David Baddiel, the author of “Jews Don’t Count”, has said:

“It is othering and alienating”

that Jews do not have a distinct ethnic box to reflect their race.

Since 7 October, the British Jewish community has faced an appalling rise in antisemitic hate attacks. While the Home Office collects data on religiously motivated antisemitic hate crimes, it does not do so on racially aggravated antisemitism. That is despite instances of racial hate crime outnumbering instances of religiously aggravated hate crime by 10 to one. There is a serious risk that Jewish hate crimes are being undercounted by the Home Office because it does not have its own Jewish ethnic category.

In the first half of this year, the Community Security Trust found that the majority of antisemitic incidents that it recorded consisted of “anti-Jewish discourse” linking the victim

“to Israel, Palestine, the Hamas terror attack or the subsequent war.”

According to Crown Prosecution Service prosecution guidance, hate targeting someone’s real or perceived nationality or national origins, such as a link to Israel, would indicate a racially, not religiously, aggravated offence.

The same goes for Sikhs, as is documented in the all-party group on British Sikhs report on anti-Sikh hate. Sikhs are the most visible minority in Britain, yet we do not collect data on racist anti-Sikh hate. The last Government’s hate crime action plan effectively ignored Sikh hate, or the need to define anti-Sikh hate. Herein lies the fundamental problem with focusing on data relating to religion, rather than ethnicity, when it comes to Sikhs and Jews. Religion is not a mandatory field in crime reporting standards that the Home Office sets for police forces, apart from in religiously aggravated hate crime cases. However, police forces are required to record ethnicity, or use ethnic appearance codes that relate to census categories that do not include Sikhs and Jews, despite their recognition in the Equality Act 2010. His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services has produced at least 30 reports since 2017 criticising police forces for the poor recording of data on the ethnicity of victims of crime.

Let me give a final example. In October, the chief executive of the UK Jewish film festival warned of the

“erasure of British-Jewish culture from national cultural life”

by arts bodies, which are of course largely publicly funded. Benjamin Till, a composer who has been nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award, told the Jewish Chronicle that Arts Council England

“doesn’t allow Jewish people to identify as anything other than a religion”.

He insists that Arts Council England

“must accept that Jewishness is a cultural, and…an ethnic identity.”

As the all-party group on British Sikhs and the Board of Deputies of British Jews have warned, even on its own merits, using religious questions to capture data on our communities will increasingly become irrelevant. The percentage of Sikhs and Jews who identify with their ethnic group but do not practise their religion is growing. As Britain becomes increasingly secular, we are failing to recognise the other ways in which British Sikhs and Jews face discrimination. Ethnicity data can capture that in ways that religion data does not. As the Board of Deputies of British Jews has said:

“We are concerned that until this situation is rectified, many Jewish citizens will not feel fully counted.”

A former cabinet member for public health and protection on Sandwell council says that Sikhs and Jews are forgotten when it comes to the design of services because there is no ethnicity data on Jews and Sikhs to inform those decisions.

In the rare cases where we do have some data, it exposes glaring inequalities. In 2018, 5.3% of deaths of homeless people in London were of Sikhs, who are 1.3% of London’s general population; and 27% of Sikhs in the UK report that someone in their family has an alcohol addiction. Good quality data saves lives.

In the past few years, the Office for National Statistics has come to acknowledge the need to ensure that the ethnicity standard reflects the diversity of the UK population. That surely means it is time to address the injustice facing Sikh and Jewish people. Whatever the future of ethnicity data collection, we must routinely be included in our own right. If we consider our legal status as ethnic groups, we should be included. If we consider the size of our populations, we should be included. If we consider our contribution to Great Britain and society, we should be included. If we consider the specific forms of discrimination and the inequalities we face, we should be included.

Our communities are asking for fairness and justice and to be counted as ethnic groups, given that we have been recognised as such in law for more than 40 years. As David Baddiel has argued,

“identifying antisemitism as religious intolerance, rather than racism, downgrades its importance, which is what leads to Jews not counting.”

The same goes for Sikhs, and it is not just a rhetorical point; it is literally the case that regarding Sikhs and Jews as a religious category means we are not counted. We are not counted when we fill in a form in an NHS waiting room, we are not counted in the census and local councils do not count us in the data they use to monitor and deliver services. It is high time that changed, so I urge Members across the House to allow this Bill to progress today. It is high time that public bodies ended this injustice, and as legislators we must put right this wrong and support them in doing that.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Preet Kaur Gill, Ben Coleman, Jas Athwal, Jon Pearce, David Pinto-Duschinsky, Joani Reid and Alex Sobel present the Bill.

Preet Kaur Gill accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the first time; to be read a Second time on Friday 7 March 2025, and to be printed (Bill 142).