Baroness Cash (Con)

My Lords, I am sorry—it is me again. I very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Katz, for the White Paper, which I have skim-read—I will admit that I have not read it closely—and I welcome again its contents and direction of travel on this. I tabled this amendment because the White Paper does not go so far as making a statutory requirement around the reporting of data. It is my position that this is an opportunity for the Government to do that and, with one simple amendment, to make this requirement and enforce this consistency across all the reporting of the amendments. This is not a new proposal. It is the 18-category standard proposal of ethnicity, which is a framework used in the UK census, first introduced nationally in 2001 and expanded in 2011 and 2021. That includes five broad ethnic groups: white mix, multiple Asian, Asian British, black African and Caribbean, black British and other, each with broad subcategories. The College of Policing, the Home Office and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services all recommend that self-defined ethnicity, not officer-led definitions or visual categories, be used in operational and statistical recording. In policing that is known as SDE, or the self-defined ethnicity standard. Crucially, there is no statutory obligation to use this system, no uniformity across police forces and no enforcement if it is bypassed. That is the gap that this amendment seeks to close. The current reality is a patchwork of practices. Police officers are instructed to ask for self-defined ethnicity at various stages, but compliance with that is highly variable. In many cases they substitute visual shorthand, which is crude, unreliable and not comparable with either the census or the official data. Even where self-defined ethnicity is collected, the categories used are not always aligned with the full 18-category standard set. We have a patchwork at the moment, with forces using different ways of defining ethnicity and not uniformly communicating or building a database. The result has been quantifiable gaps in current reporting. Victims’ ethnicity is often missing, undermining the understanding of harm. In 2023, His Majesty’s Inspectorate found that in 61% of all cases where a victim was identified, ethnicity was not recorded at all. That is not a technicality; it is a collapse of visibility over who is being harmed and how. Similarly, stop and search data is increasingly incomplete. Home Office statistics show that in stop and search records, self-defined ethnicity is missing in 20% of cases. That is one in five encounters without proper identification, and that source is the Office for Statistics Regulation. Prevent referrals are particularly shocking and show chronic underrecording. Between 2015 and 2023, police failed to record the ethnicity of more than 33,000 Prevent referrals. I cannot imagine an area of policing and national security where the ethnicity of an individual referred might be more important. Operational consequences for victims, offenders and public oversight also manifest from these absences. Victims go unseen if ethnicity is unrecorded; they cannot have services tailored to them, and violent crime prevention cannot be prioritised. We do not understand whether different communities are underreporting crime or, indeed, overreporting. In homicide—murder—data for the year ending March 2022, only 671 victims had their ethnicity recorded; the rest were either missing or excluded—that is from the Home Office’s own data reports. Without the full self-defined ethnicity data at each stage of police contact, we cannot fulfil our obligations under the Equality Act. The 18-category of self-defined ethnicity is the gold standard. It has been highly commended by multiple public bodies. When the police rely on visual codes or simplified lists of their own, they often misclassify individuals. They lose comparability with the census or with NHS and education data, so there is no cross- reporting across our own public bodies. They also create a very dangerous vacuum where speculation and grievance thrive—we have seen that in media reporting of issues in the last few years, where tensions in communities build and demands are made for greater transparency. The vacuum has happened in child sexual exploitation cases. In the Casey review in June 2025, the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, reported that ethnicity data was missing in two-thirds of the cases. Public debate has become polarised about grooming gangs since, with both denial and exaggeration filling the vacuum where the facts and data should have been. In Prevent referrals, where ethnicity was unrecorded in the 33,000 cases I have just mentioned, communities have accused the state of Islamophobic bias; others say that Prevent is too soft. Again, there is no data to resolve the dispute or even have an informed debate on. In high-profile arrests, where ethnicity is omitted—the Home Secretary herself has spoken about this—social media becomes saturated with speculation, particularly from extremist or far-right actors, and forces the police into reactive disclosures. The former Met officer, Dal Babu, has said that “there will be an expectation for police to release information on every single occasion” because there is such intense speculation from the far-right on social media. These vacuums of information and of data are really dangerous. My appeal to the Government is that a statutory duty to record full self-defined ethnicity at every point of contact solves these problems and gives us standardised, comparable data to analyse and act upon. The costs would be minimal but the status quo is very expensive. If we do nothing and we do not require this accurate reporting, we have operational blind spots, cross- system breakdowns, reputational damage to the police, and litigation risk. It is also extremely difficult retrospectively to rebuild community engagement or to repair crises when the damage has been done and trust has collapsed. Police leadership supports better recording. In September 2023, Steve Hartshorn, chair of the Police Federation, said that senior officers must be held accountable for failing to record victims’ ethnicity. It is not just a data issue; it is about accountability and fairness. In August 2025 the new College of Policing guidance supported the proactive release of ethnicity and nationality data where it strengthens trust and clarifies public understanding. In December 2025 senior police officials, including Gareth Edwards of the NPCC’s vulnerability knowledge and practice programme, spoke on this. I could go on. Noble Lords will already be familiar with some of them from past reporting on this very issue of transparency and trust. It begins with visibility, a consistent system, and a mandatory requirement to record the data. I know that the Government’s sentiments and intentions are already in this direction of travel, and this is an opportunity to make it happen. I beg to move.