Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure that (1) departments, and (2) other publicly-funded bodies, categorise Gypsies, Travellers and Roma as “white minority ethnic groups” for statistical and reporting purposes, rather than designating them either as “white British” or “minority ethnic”.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority. I have, therefore, asked the Authority to respond.

Professor Sir Ian Diamond | National Statistician

Baroness Whitaker

House of Lords

London
SW1A 0PW

22 September 2021

Dear Baroness Whitaker,

As National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking what steps have been taken to ensure that departments, and other publicly-funded bodies, categorise Gypsies, Travellers and Roma as ‘white minority ethnic groups’ for statistical and reporting purposes, rather than designating them either as ‘white British’ or ‘minority ethnic’ (HL2813).

A core principle of the UK Statistics Authority’s strategy Statistics for the Public Good[1] is inclusivity. I can assure you that we are taking steps towards ensuring our statistics reflect the experiences of everyone in our society so that everyone counts and is counted, and that no one is forgotten.

Following consultation, research, and testing by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), a new ‘Roma’ response option was added to the ethnic group question within the higher-level ‘White’ category for Census 2021 for England and Wales[2]. This was in addition to the ‘Gypsy or Irish Traveller’ response option, which has been included since the 2011 Census[3].

Our Census 2021 output and analysis plans[4] include separate tailored analysis on both the Gypsy and Irish Traveller communities and the Roma communities in England and Wales. As part of developing this analysis we are engaging with Gypsy, Roma and Irish Traveller community organisations, as well as other government and expert users, to better understand the data and analysis needs around these communities.

The GSS (Government Statistical Service) harmonised standards set out how to collect and report statistics to ensure comparability across different data collections in Government. For ethnicity[5], we suggest reporting with greater granularity, which has been recommended by the Minister for Equalities (‘Departments and other agencies should publish a statement on GOV.UK outlining their plans to move their data collections to the Government Statistical Service’s (GSS) harmonised ethnicity data standard’.[6]) Over the past 12 months these standards have been adopted as the GDS’s (Government Digital Service) design pattern[7] for equalities information, meaning that Government digital services collecting administrative information are recommended to adopt these standards.

In addition, the GSS Harmonisation Champions Network[8], which includes representatives from all departments across Government which publish National Statistics, also encourage their departments to adopt these harmonised standards.

Finally, I’d like to highlight the work of the Inclusive Data Taskforce (IDTF), a group of senior academics and civil society leaders with expertise on a range of equalities topics and research methods. In October 2020, I commissioned this group to develop recommendations on how to make a step-change in the inclusivity of UK data and evidence in a broad range of areas, including ethnicity. Their recommendations will be launched on 28 September and will form the basis of a programme of work to be taken forward across government and more widely to radically improve the UK’s inclusive data infrastructure, including in relation to different ethnic groups.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Sir Ian Diamond

[1] https://uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/statistics-for-the-public-good/

[2]https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/censustransformationprogramme/questiondevelopment/nationalidentityethnicgrouplanguageandreligionquestiondevelopmentforcensus2021

[3]https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=/census/2011census/howourcensusworks/howweplannedthe2011census/questionnairedevelopment/finalisingthe2011questionnaire/final-recommended-questions-2011-ethnic-group_tcm77-183998.pdf

[4]https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/censustransformationprogramme/census2021outputs/2021dataproducts/analysis/ethnicgroupnationalidentitylanguageandreligion

[5] https://gss.civilservice.gov.uk/policy-store/ethnicity/

[6] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/second-quarterly-report-on-progress-to-address-covid-19-health-inequalities

[7] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/equality-information/

[8] https://gss.civilservice.gov.uk/about-us/champion-networks/harmonisation-champions/