Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of whether the potential impact of the absence of separate Sikh and Jewish ethnicity categories in NHS datasets on (a) the identification of and (b) response to COVID-19 health inequalities affecting those communities.

The Government recognises the impacts highlighted by Lord Mann arising from the failure to record the ethnicities of Jewish and Sikh people in National Health Service data.

We have committed to consult on the inclusion of Jewish and Sikh identities within NHS protected characteristic datasets, and the findings from that consultation will inform our decisions on future implementation.