Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what safeguards are in place to prevent potential structural bias in healthcare datasets and to address gaps in health data relating to Black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals.

Our 10-Year Health Plan for England sets out a reimagined service designed to tackle health inequalities in both access and outcomes. This includes tackling conditions where there are the greatest disparities for ethnic groups.

We remain committed to reducing the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest, an ambitious commitment that shows the Government is serious about tackling health inequalities and addressing the social determinants of health. Indicators to monitor progress in health inequalities are measured in key data outcomes, such as the life expectancy estimates for England and sub-national areas, produced by the Office for National Statistics.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed gaps in available data, including the quality of ethnicity data held to support the identification of health inequalities among ethnic minority communities.

There are a number of barriers to the consistent and accurate collection and recording of ethnicity data in the National Health Service, such as outdated ethnicity codes as a result of the need for the NHS to migrate from the 2001 to the 2021 Census ethnicity classification. There is also a need for a single point of collection of ethnicity data which multiple systems could speak to. Ethnicity needing to be recorded multiple times currently increases the likelihood of inconsistencies between data collected in different settings, as does inconsistency in how staff approach ethnicity data collection and recording, and there are particular challenges in some settings such as the ambulance services and accident and emergency. These inconsistencies can mean some individual patients having multiple ethnic codes from different settings and contacts with the healthcare system. In addition, the overuse of ‘Not stated’ and ‘Unknown’ ethnicity codes leads to gaps in data, undermining robust analysis of healthcare inequalities between ethnic groups

In October 2025, NHS England published an Ethnicity Recording Improvement Plan, which includes actions to address structural and practical barriers to high quality ethnicity recording at a system level, as well as guidance to support providers and systems to implement best practice ethnicity recording, including training staff and supporting patients to understand why and how this data is used. Data quality is a feature of the NHS Oversight Framework 2026/27 via inclusion of the data quality maturity index, meaning that NHS trusts are scored on the quality of their data overall. The completeness of their ethnicity data forms part of this overall index. Work is also underway within to address some of the barriers to high quality ethnicity data, including work to support the NHS’s migration to modernised ethnicity codes.

More generally, Department will look to improve data quality and timeliness, and fill data gaps around equalities in partnership with stakeholders.