Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord O'Shaughnessy on 9 April (HL6732), whether they are taking account of the finding in the report by the Social Exclusion Task Force and Department of Health, Inclusion Health, published in March 2010, that lack of ethnic monitoring in relation to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities “makes it difficult to ascertain which services are making a difference, to whom, and by how much”; and what progress they have made with NHS England to investigate whether data collection in the NHS could include more of the protected characteristics listed under the Equality Act 2010 to provide better information about Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities’ access to healthcare.

The Department is in the process of reviewing the collection of data within the National Health Service and has commissioned NHS England to complete a scoping exercise to understand how information on protected characteristics is gathered in existing NHS datasets, including the NHS Data Model and Dictionary which currently use the 2001 census ethnicity categories. Subject to the publication of the 2021 Census White Paper, we plan to complete an initial assessment by the end of 2018, which will form the basis for future decision-making on NHS data collection.