Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of introducing specific (a) Sikh and (b) Jewish options for a person’s ethnic group in data collection conducted by his Department.

The merits of including Jewish or Sikh as an option when recording ethnicity in National Health Service data, and other issues relating to how the NHS records information on protected characteristics, are being considered by the Unified Information Standard for Protected Characteristics (UISPC) programme. The UISPC programme is a wide-ranging NHS England and Department led review of equality monitoring that examines workforce, employment, and patient datasets and national surveys. It explores how best to update equality monitoring arrangements by reference to the protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010.