Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if his department plans to respond to the public consultation on the Government Statistical Service Harmonisation Standard for Ethnicity that concludes on 4 February.

The Department is not planning a central response to the public consultation on ethnicity harmonisation standards. However, it is likely that individual statistical production teams will have responded to the consultation. This information is not tracked nor held centrally.

The Department recognises that harmonisation is important for effective and accurate data comparison. Harmonisation standards are “designed to promote alignment across organisations, not to enforce identical approaches”. Therefore, on a team level, statistical producers may have views on how standards apply to their datasets of interest and how ethnicity data collection and reporting should be altered. A formal, central response would not capture the nuances of user need.