Mr Speaker, I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to provide that, where a public body collects data about ethnicity for the purpose of delivering public services, it must include specific “Sikh” and “Jewish” categories as options for a person’s ethnic group; and for connected purposes.
Jews and Sikhs are in the unique position of being considered both ethnic and religious groups under the Equality Act 2010. Sikhs and Jews have been legally recognised as ethnic groups for over 40 years since the Mandla v Dowell Lee case in 1983.
The Bill would address a fundamental absurdity in the fight against discrimination and inequality, that we do not collect ethnicity data on Sikhs and Jews since laws on racial discrimination were first introduced nearly 60 years ago.
The Women and Equalities Select Committee were told in February 2018 that the Government’s Race Disparity Audit had identified around 340 datasets across government, but found no data on Sikhs.
The only data collected on Sikhs and Jews in more recent years is religious data. However, the quality of data collected by public bodies on religion compared to ethnicity is poor, patchy and incomplete. Religion data is never used by public bodies to make decisions for the purposes of delivering public services. It makes both Jews and Sikhs invisible to policymakers – therefore ignoring the inequality and discrimination both groups face.
That is why a specific Jewish and Sikh ethnic category is needed.
That is what this Bill will do.
Mr Speaker, this is a campaign to end the discrimination both communities face.
I campaigned for a Sikh and Jewish ethnic tick box to be included in the 2021 Census, because we know public bodies have been instructed for over 30 years to use the design of the Census ethnic groups questions to design and deliver services in compliance with equalities legislation.
As protected characteristics, you would expect that public bodies are instructed to routinely collect information on Sikhs and Jews. But they are not.
As an Equalities Minister wrote to me last year:
“Public bodies and decision-makers who think that their decisions may affect discrimination, harassment, or victimisation of Sikhs, […] should ensure that their compliance with the duty includes considerations of Sikh ethnicity.”
But they don’t, because people incorrectly argue and assume data collected on religion is a suitable substitute. Those people don’t understand the existing practices.
Religion data is rarely collected to a good standard, it excludes non-practicing Sikhs and Jews, and it is not used by public bodies to monitor and reduce inequalities, or provide public services.
Sikhs and Jews are missing from whole swathes of public data: education; housing; crime; health; criminal justice; the public sector workforce; the ethnicity pay gap.
The proposal in this Bill would allow public bodies to start systematically collecting data on Sikhs and Jews to address the discrimination and inequalities they face. Especially as the Government has made a commitment to require ethnicity pay gap reporting.
In presenting this Bill today, I have the support of a wide range of community organisations. This includes the Sikh Council UK, 112 UK Gurdwaras and organisations, The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Antisemitism Policy Trust and the Community Security Trust (CST).
I would like to provide the House with a few examples of why this Bill is so important.
The pandemic shone a harsh light on the inequalities between different ethnic groups.
Many experts in public health now recognise that we were too slow to recognise that some ethnic groups were dying at a far higher rate than others.
The Office of National Statistics (ONS) belatedly started analysing Covid related deaths data by religious group, where data was available – a short-term exercise that has since been discontinued.
It found that Sikhs died disproportionately from Covid even after adjusting for region, population density, area deprivation, household composition, socio-economic status, and a range of other economic indicators.
Not only this, but it showed that Sikhs were affected at a very different rate to other predominantly South Asian groups – meaning that analysis using the existing ethnic minority categories would fail to capture any of these inequalities.
The Board of Deputies has also recognised these arguments.
British Jews died at almost twice the rate of the rest of the population.
With the higher prevalence of certain genetic conditions among Jewish people, for example breast cancer in Ashkenazi Jewish women, collecting better data will help public services profile and respond to the community better.
Surely to address health inequalities, we need to learn from the pandemic and collect accurate data to address outcomes for both these communities, given the evidence base?
To give just one example, which highlights the absurdity of this system, the NHS Blood and Transplant Authority does not collect data on Sikh organ donors or Sikhs requiring an organ transplant, despite a policy of more than a decade of trying to encourage more Sikhs to become donors!
They do not hold the single most important data point that would allow us to improve sign-up rates in this underrepresented group!
It’s simply shocking!
As Amanda Bowman, Vice-President of the Board of Deputies, wrote last year:
“Imagine you’re sitting in a hospital waiting room and have been asked to fill out a form which, among other questions, asks for your ethnicity. […] So which box do I tick?”
As David Baddiel, the author of Jews Don't Count, has said:
“It is othering and alienating” that Jews do not have a distinct ethnic box to reflect their race.
Since October 7th, the British Jewish community have faced an appalling rise in antisemitic hate attacks.
While the Home Office collects data on antisemitic hate crimes by religion, it doesn’t on racially aggravated antisemitism. This is despite racial hate crime outnumbering religiously aggravated hate crime by 10:1.
There is therefore a serious risk that Jewish hate crimes are being undercounted by the Home Office, because they do not have their own Jewish ethnic category.
In the first half of this year, the Community Security Trust (CST) found that the majority (52%) of antisemitic incidents they recorded consisted of “anti-Jewish discourse linking the victim to Israel, Palestine, the Hamas terror attack or the subsequent war.”
According to CPS prosecution guidance, hate targeting someone’s real or perceived nationality or national origins – such as a link to Israel – would indicate a racially, not religiously, aggravated offence.
The same also goes for Sikhs, as has been documented in the APPG on British Sikhs’ report into anti-Sikh hate. Sikhs are the most visible minority in Britain, yet we do not collect data on racist anti-Sikh hate.
The last government’s hate crime action plan effectively ignored Sikh hate or the definition of anti-Sikh hate.
Here in is the fundamental problem with consigning Sikhs and Jews to exercises focused on religion data, and not ethnicity.
Religion is not a mandatory field in terms of crime reporting standards set by the Home Office for police forces, apart from in religiously aggravated hate crime cases only. However, police forces are required to record ethnicity or EA codes using Census categories, where Sikhs and Jews do not exist despite recognition in Equality Act 2010.
His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services has produced at least 30 different reports since 2017 criticising police forces for the poor recording of data on the ethnicity of victims of crime.
A final example.
In October, the chief executive of UK Jewish Film Festival warned of the “erasure of British-Jewish culture from national cultural life” by arts bodies, which are of course largely publicly funded.
Benjamin Till, a Bafta-nominated composer, told the Jewish Chronicle that the Arts Council “doesn’t allow Jewish people to identify as anything other than a religion” and insists it “must accept that Jewishness is a cultural, and an ethnic identity.”
As the APPG on British Sikhs and Board of Deputies have warned, even on its own merits, using religious questions to capture data on our communities will increasingly become irrelevant.
The percentage of Sikhs and Jews who identify with their ethnic group but do not practise their religion is growing.
As Britain becomes increasingly secular, we are failing to recognise how British Sikhs and Jews face discrimination in other ways.
Ethnicity data can capture this in ways that religion data doesn’t.
As the Board of Deputies has said, “We are concerned that until this situation is rectified, many Jewish citizens will not feel fully counted.”
As a former Cabinet Member for Public Health and Protection on Sandwell Council, Sikhs and Jews are forgotten when it comes to the design of services, because there is no ethnicity data on Jews and Sikhs to inform those decisions. Religious data is not used.
In the rare cases where we do have some data, it often exposes glaring inequalities.
In 2018, 5.3% of homeless deaths in London were Sikh vs 1.3% of the general population in the city.
27% of Sikhs in the UK report that someone in their family has an alcohol addiction.
The pandemic revealed that both Sikh and Jewish people were dying at a significantly greater rate than other groups.
Good quality data saves lives.
In the past few years, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has come to acknowledge the need to “ensure the ethnicity standard reflects the diversity of the UK population.”
That surely means it is time to address this injustice facing Sikh and Jewish people.
Whatever the future of ethnicity data collection, we must routinely be included in our own right:
If you consider our legal status as ethnic groups: we should be included.
If you consider the size of our populations: we should be included.
If you consider our contribution to Great Britain and society: we should be included.
If you consider the specific forms of discrimination and inequalities we face: we should be included.
What our communities are asking for is fairness and justice:
To be counted as ethnic groups given we have been recognised as such in law for over 40 years.
As David Baddiel has argued, “identifying antisemitism as religious intolerance, rather than racism, downgrades its importance, which is what leads to Jews not counting.”
The same goes for Sikhs.
And this is not just a rhetorical point.
It is literally the case that regarding Sikhs and Jews as a religious category means we are not counted.
We are not counted when we fill in a form in an NHS waiting room.
Not counted in the Census.
And local Councils don’t count us in the data they use to monitor and deliver services.
It’s high time that changed, and so I urge Members across the House to allow this Bill to progress today.
It’s high time that public bodies ended this injustice. As legislators we must put this wrong right and to support them to do that.
Watch the full speech here: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/3bd4934f-3cb3-45b3-b6c5-678a2c831723?in=12:36:11
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