This petition was submitted during the 2019-2024 parliament
Rejected petition Implement a Hispanic ethnicity tick box to ALL UK forms
Make it mandatory for all forms across the country to include “Hispanic” as an ethnicity that is recognised.
More details
Hispanics are a big group of the ethnic minority in the UK who do not get enough recognition and are made to tick “other white” or “other” because we do not fit into any other Ethnic group. As the UK accepts the amount of diversity that there is, it is only fair that a massive Ethnic group like “Hispanics” can get the recognition that is needed to represent people from Latin America and Spanish speaking countries in the UK.
This petition was rejected
Why was this petition rejected?
It’s about something that the UK Government or Parliament is not directly responsible for.
The Government is not responsible for mandating how ethnicity is recorded on diversity monitoring forms.
The Equality Act 2010 created a duties for public sector authorities in respect of equality legislation, but the legislation did not create a legal duty to collect equality information. The Equality Act makes race, including nationality, a protected characteristic.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has advised that having due regard to the aims of the general equality duty requires public authorities to have an adequate evidence base for their decision-making: https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/psed_essential_guide_-_guidance_for_english_public_bodies.pdf
The information that authorities might want to collect is not set out in law, and the EHRC states that the information that different authorities will need to collect to inform their decisions under the general equality duty will vary widely between different sectors, and will depend on a number of factors.
The Government's style guide sets out a list of ethnic groups it recommends be used by government when they ask for someone’s ethnicity: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/style-guide/ethnic-groups
The recommended groups are decided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which decides which ethnic groups to include in consultation with users of Census data (like government departments, local authorities, and the National Health Service), and people completing the Census, and the interest groups that represent them.
We only reject petitions that don’t meet the petition standards.