Classification of ethnicity in the United Kingdom
[4] Sociologist Peter J. Aspinall has categorised what he regards as a number of "persistent problems with salient collective terminology".
[8] In 2007, Simpson and Bola Akinwale also studied the stability of individuals' responses to ethnic group questions between the 1991 and 2001 census.
[11] User consultation undertaken by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for the purpose of planning the 2011 census in England and Wales found that most of the respondents from all ethnic groups that took part in the testing felt comfortable with the use of the terms "Black" and "White".
[12] Between 2004 and 2008, the General Register Office for Scotland (GOS) conducted official consultation, research and question testing for the purpose of planning the 2011 Scottish census, with key evidence informing the new classification drawn from similar workshops carried out by the Office for National Statistics, the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG), and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA).
[13] There were calls for the 2011 national census in England and Wales to include extra tick boxes so people could identify their ethnic group in category A as English, Welsh and Cornish.
They remarked that the category did not provide enough information on the considerable diversity that existed within the various populations currently classified under this heading.
To remedy this, the Muslim Council of Britain proposed that this census category should be broken down instead into specific ethnic groups.
[17] NABA reasoned that "lack of recognition of Arabs as a separate ethnic group, and hence their exclusion, has serious consequences for the planning of services and monitoring of such problems as racial discrimination".
[20][21] However, in the ONS's testing in England and Wales prior to the census, no Kurdish, Iranian, Berber, Somali or Egyptian participants chose to identify as Arab.
[22] Discussing the inclusion of nationalities such as "British" and "Irish" in the ethnic group categories of the census, Nissa Finney and Ludi Simpson argue that "on purely technical grounds, this is a mistake, confirmed by enumerators reporting that some Asian respondents had ticked 'British', having seen it as the first box and wishing to confirm their British identity and nationality".
[23] Samira Shackle, writing in the New Statesman, argues that "the fact that hundreds of thousands choose to describe their own ethnicity as Welsh, Scottish, or Cornish shows that 'ethnic British' is a nebulous concept".
[31] One of the recommendations of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry was that people stopped and searched by the police should have their self-defined ethnic identity recorded.
In March 2002, the Association of Chief Police Officers proposed a new system for self-definition, based on the 2001 census.
Police forces and civil and emergency services, the NHS and local authorities in England and Wales may refer to this as the "6+1" system, named after the 6 classifications of ethnicity plus one category for "not stated".
When a person is stopped by a police officer exercising statutory powers and asked to provide information under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, they are asked to select one of the five main categories representing broad ethnic groups and then a more specific cultural background from within this group.
The "6+1" IC code system remains widely used, when the police are unable to stop a suspect and ask them to give their self-defined ethnicity.
[35] Additionally, researchers conducting analysis for the London Borough of Lambeth have argued that broad ethnic groupings such as "black African" or "white other" can hide significant variation in educational performance, so they instead recommend the use of language categories.
[41] Writing in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Charles Agyemang, Raj Bhopal and Marc Bruijnzeels argue that: "The current groupings of African descent populations in the USA and the UK such as Black, Black African, and African American hide the huge heterogeneity within these groups, which weakens the value of ethnic categorisation as a means of providing culturally appropriate health care, and in understanding the causes of ethnic differences in disease.
[42] Since the Second World War, many minority groups in the UK were collectively referred to as "coloured", a term that is deprecated and offensive in modern-day usage.
[52] In November 2022, the Labour-run Westminster City Council committed to replace BAME with "global majority."
