GSS consultations
This page includes open consultations which are available to members of the Government Statistical Service (GSS). We value all voices across the community and encourage you to share your reflections through these short surveys.
If you have questions about the content on this page, require support, or would like to publicise your consultation, please email GSSNet@statistics.gov.uk.
This consultation closed at 11:59pm on 4 February 2026. Thank you to everyone who took part.
Information about this consultation, including evaluation criteria and updates, are available on the Ethnicity harmonised standard consultation: assessing user needs for additional response options page.
Summary
This consultation asked for views on whether additional tick-box response options may be required on a new harmonised standard for collecting data on ethnicity. It was part of the Government Statistical Service (GSS) Harmonisation team’s ongoing review of this standard.
The consultation coincided with Census 2031 Topic Consultations being held in England and Wales and Northern Ireland, and overlapped with the Census Topic consultation in Scotland. This was done to maximise the consultation’s visibility to respondents.
The new ethnicity harmonised standard will be recommended for use by data collectors across the GSS, including teams working on the next censuses in the United Kingdom (UK). We expect the UK statistics organisations to consider this standard when developing questions, and for the relevant census question to align to this standard in England and Wales. Depending on the user needs of each UK nation, this may be provided through a single version or a suite of harmonised questions.
The GSS Vision: Strength in Numbers was published last year. The GSS Metrics Task and Finish Group launched a short survey in August to help monitor progress on the ambitions, what you feel is working, and what we should focus on improving. The survey closed in September.
Findings were reported to NSEG in November 2025, and updates were provided to members on action we are taking in the GSS Conference (November 2025). An update on the GSS vision was subsequently published in the February 2026 GSS vision update.