Ethnicity harmonised standard consultation: assessing user needs for additional response options
Information about the “Ethnicity harmonised standard consultation: assessing user needs for additional response options” is available on this page.
If you have questions about the ethnicity harmonised standard, please contact harmonisation@statistics.gov.uk.
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 consultation closed at 11:59pm on 4 February 2026. Thank you to everyone who took part in this consultation.
This consultation opened on 28 October 2025 and closed on 4 February 2026, and was promoted to a range of stakeholders.
Further information about the consultation is available on the consultation overview page of the ONS consultation website, where it was hosted.
An introductory webinar was also held, for which the following materials are available:
- Recording of the introductory webinar
- Slides from the introductory webinar in English
- Slides from the introductory webinar in Welsh
Access the April 2026 update on Monday 27 April at 9:30am, which summarises who responded to the consultation, outlines how we engaged with users during the consultation period, and sets out the next steps.
Information about further updates will be added to this page as they become available.
The evaluation criteria for this consultation were published in the Analysis Function guidance and research directory on 4 March 2026:
Reviews of the existing ethnicity harmonised standard are available in the Analysis Function guidance and research directory. The following reviews have been published to date:
- Review of the ethnicity harmonised standard: additional work to explore potential new response options (December 2024)
- Review of ethnicity harmonised standard: findings from phase 1 of our research (March 2023)
- Review of ethnicity harmonised standard: findings from phase 2 of our research (July 2023)
- Review of the ethnicity harmonised standard: overview of our redesign research to date (June 2025)
- Review of the ethnicity harmonised standard: findings from the review of ‘write-in’ responses (September 2025)