Legislative boost for Sikhs and Jews

Britain’s first female Sikh MP, Preet Kaur Gill, is promoting a Bill to require public bodies to record Sikhs and Jews as ethnic groups.

The Public Body Ethnicity Data (Inclusion of Jewish and Sikh Categories) Bill will receive a second reading in March this year after being introduced as a Private Members’ Bill to Parliament by Gill, the Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, in December 2024.

Jews and Sikhs are considered both ethnic and religious groups under the Equality Act 2010 and have been legally recognised as ethnic groups for over 40 years.

The Bill aims to ensure that where public bodies collect data about ethnicity for the purpose of delivering public services, they include specific “Sikh” and “Jewish” categories as options for a person’s ethnic group.

Gill says this is especially relevant given the government’s commitment to ethnicity pay gap reporting.

In a House of Commons speech, Gill said that the only data collected on Sikhs and Jews in most recent years is religious data.

But she argued that the quality of data collected by public bodies on religion compared to ethnicity is “poor, patchy and incomplete” and is never used by public bodies to make decisions for the purposes of delivering public services.

She said this “makes both Jews and Sikhs invisible to policymakers, therefore ignoring the inequality and discrimination both groups face”.