Jewish and Sikh people won’t count until we’re recorded as ethnic groups
4 min read
Data is the lifeblood of modern government. It helps plan schools, hospitals, roads, and social services. It helps policymakers see trends, measure progress, and think big. It means resources can go where they are needed most.
It is for good reason that completing the once-in-a-decade census has been mandatory for over 100 years. Government cannot serve its citizens without an accurate picture of who it is serving. And yet, for all its importance, some communities are ignored by the public bodies that serve them.
Sikhs and Jews have been legally recognised as ethnic groups for over 40 years. Both are in the unique position of being recognised as both an ethnicity and a religion in the Equality Act 2010. But both communities have been missed out by public bodies not recording them as ethnic groups.
My campaign would ensure public bodies gather the data they need to meet their duties under equalities legislation. In December, I presented the Public Body Ethnicity Data (Inclusion of Jewish and Sikh Categories) Bill, which would 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.
Without ethnicity data, Sikh and Jewish people are invisible to decision-makers. It is absurd that, since laws on racial discrimination were first introduced nearly 60 years ago, we still do not collect this information. In 2017, the government conducted the Race Disparity Audit, looking at hundreds of datasets across government to identify inequalities facing different communities. Despite looking at 340 datasets across government, it found no data on Sikhs.
The real-world repercussions are serious. Following the first wave of the pandemic, some ethnic minorities were found to be dying at nearly four times the rate of the general population. The government had to quickly improve its analysis of health inequalities, with the Office for National Statistics starting a regular analysis of Covid-related deaths data by religious group – a short-term exercise that has since been discontinued.
It found that Sikhs died disproportionately from Covid even after adjusting for other factors.
Not only this, but it showed that Sikhs were affected at a significantly different rate to other predominantly South Asian groups – so using the existing ethnic minority categories would fail to capture any of these inequalities. And Jewish people died at almost twice the rate of the rest of the population. Yet, sitting in any NHS waiting room, asked to fill out a form, neither Sikhs nor Jews would find their own option to tick.
Since October 7, the British Jewish community has faced an appalling rise in antisemitic hate attacks, as documented by brilliant community organisations like the Community Security Trust. But while the Home Office collects data on hate crimes by targeted religion, it doesn’t on racially aggravated antisemitism. That is despite instances of racial hate crime outnumbering instances of religiously aggravated hate crime by 10:1.
Opponents of expanding the ethnic minority categories to include Sikhs and Jews have argued that there is no problem because we are also classified as religious groups. This is wrong on three counts.
First, it ignores that public bodies only use ethnic categories and not religious data to deliver public services. Secondly, as Britain becomes more secular, using religious questions to capture data on our communities will increasingly become irrelevant. Thirdly, ethnicity data captures things religion simply doesn’t. Hate crime directed at Jews is often driven by the perpetrator’s views on Israel, not Judaism. And it is not religious differences that make Ashkenazi women more susceptible to breast cancer, nor Sikhs to diabetes or alcohol addiction.
Until our communities are recognised as ethnic groups in our own right, Jews and Sikhs will not be fully counted and the inequalities we face will persist unchecked. It is time for policymakers to put in place what the Equality Act promised. By backing my bill, Parliament can right those wrongs.
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