
Last Wednesday, our CEO, Jabeer Butt OBE, spoke at the inaugural UK Statistics Assembly, hosted by the UK Statistics Authority in partnership with the Royal Statistical Society. This event brought together a diverse range of voices from government, business, academia, and civil society to discuss the role of statistics in shaping policy and public life.
Jabeer discussed our work with the Office for National Statistics, commissioned by the Wellcome Trust titled ‘improving the recording of ethnicity in health datasets: exploring the views of community respondents and the healthcare workforce’. He highlighted key findings from our research, which revealed significant quality issues in ethnicity data related to health experiences, including variations in completeness and accuracy.
Incomplete or inaccurate recording of ethnicity can severely undermine efforts to tackle health inequalities and improve healthcare access, experiences, and outcomes for Black, Asian, and minoritised ethnic communities. However, our research also found that patients and members of the public were generally willing to provide this information, suggesting that targeted action could enhance both the completeness and accuracy of data collection.
Jabeer Butt OBE explained:
“The inexorable rise of data sources that record ‘ethnic group’ has been accompanied by calls for ever greater levels of disaggregation, yet there is little theoretical exploration of why this is needed. One consequence is that we no longer use this data to understand the existence or persistence of racism but instead use ethnicity to explain ‘disparity’ with concepts such as ‘ethnic penalty’ becoming commonly used in policy discussions.
The lack of focus on racism has been accompanied by repeated attempts to explain away discriminatory experiences and outcomes. Examples from the Lammy Review of the criminal justice system, the Timpson Review of school exclusions, and the Government’s response to the impact of COVID-19 suggest that the availability of data is not the only challenge we face in using ‘ethnic group’ data to bring about change.
I concluded that it was not that the ethnic group data was poor, in fact, we have better data and infrastructure than Western Europe; but that we have not done enough with the data, and we certainly have not used it sufficiently in addressing racism.