April 2026 update: Consultation on user needs for additional response options in a future ethnicity harmonised standard

Summary

Between 28 October 2025 and 4 February 2026, the Government Statistical Service (GSS) ran a consultation to gather views on whether additional tick-box response options may be required on a new harmonised standard for collecting data on ethnicity. The consultation is an important part of the GSS Harmonisation team’s ongoing review of the standard.

The update to the ethnicity harmonised standard will provide specific guidance for asking about ethnicity in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

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. We will continue to work closely with teams across the UK to understand their requirements for the standard.

This update summarises who responded to the consultation, outlines how we engaged with users during the consultation period, and sets out the next steps.

We would like to thank everybody who gave us their views by responding to the consultation.

Responses

We received 1,433 responses to the consultation. The majority of these were from individuals (1,320). The remainder were on behalf of organisations (113).

We asked organisations to select the sector that applied to them. They were able to select more than one sector in response to this question. The most commonly selected sector was “Charity or community sector” (54), this was followed by “Other” (12) and “Academia or research” (11).

Number of organisations who selected each sector

User engagement

We promoted the consultation through a range of channels throughout the consultation period. The launch of the consultation was announced in:

• a news release in English and Welsh
• a blog post: Making sure Census 2031 reflects modern society
• a news article from Scottish Government: New consultation on how governments collect information about ethnicity
• social media posts by ONS and partner statistical offices in Northern Ireland and Scotland
• newsletters
• emails to stakeholders in a range of sectors, including government departments, devolved governments, local authorities, civil society organisations and charities

We also asked our stakeholders to raise awareness of the consultation through their networks.

In November 2025, we held a public webinar attended by stakeholders across various sectors. These stakeholders included public bodies, charities and voluntary organisations, academia and local government. The webinar was recorded and later made available on YouTube.

In addition to informing relevant All Party Parliamentary Groups and MPs about the consultation, representatives from the Office for National Statistics attended Evidence Week in Parliament on 4 November 2025. They answered questions and promoted the consultation with parliamentarians, researchers and policymakers.

We sought articles in a range of media titles, blogs, newsletters and forums, including posts on StatsUserNetwork and a guest article on the Diversity Trust website. We talked about the consultation at third-party events and webinars such as Data Bites and the Local Knowledge and Intelligence Service (LKIS) online seminar.

We engaged with GSS Heads of Profession across government departments through emails and speaking slots at meetings in September 2025, October 2025 and January 2026. The consultation was further promoted to the GSS through materials, our presence at the GSS conference in November 2025, the GSS newsletter, and GSS social channels.

A series of reminders, including a further news release, were issued to alert users to the consultation closing date.

UK context

Considering the 113 organisational responses to the consultation, 98 stated their organisation represented England, 28 Wales, 27 Scotland, and 20 Northern Ireland (organisations could select more than one country).

For the individual responses, we asked “Which part of the UK are you responding from?”. In this case, 1,213 stated England, 71 Scotland, 27 Wales, 5 Northern Ireland, and 4 did not answer the question.

To ensure we fully capture the diversity of views across the UK, responses from each nation will be analysed both separately and collectively. This will help us understand where user needs are shared and where they differ. We will also be carrying out follow-up qualitative research in each nation to make sure local perspectives, priorities and context-specific needs are understood and reflected.

Next steps

Users should not use data presented at this stage to draw conclusions about decisions regarding additional response options on the ethnicity harmonised standard.

Consultation responses will be moderated as outlined in Annex B of the consultation document (PDF, 747KB). They will then be evaluated as set out in our evaluation criteria. We will publish a full report on the consultation in late summer 2026. This report will include all formal responses to the consultation, and the names of the organisations that responded.

Following this, the GSS Harmonisation team expect to announce the recommended list of response options for the new ethnicity harmonised standard in Autumn 2026. The fully tested ethnicity harmonised standard for online data collection is expected to be published by the end of 2026.