§ Mr. Maurice Macmillanasked the Secretary of State for Employment if he intends at any time in the foreseeable future to produce a regular calculation of the percentage of workers from the ethnic minority groups who are unemployed, as a percentage of the ethnic minority working population, in order the better to calculate the social effects of racial discrimination in the employment sphere.
§ Mr. BoothI am considering the possibility of obtaining such data from the next EEC labour force survey to be held in May 1979. This is a voluntary inquiry carried out every two years to provide information on the labour force characteristics of the population. It will cover about 100,000 households in the United Kingdom.
An additional question on ethnic origin would allow broad comparisons to be made of the labour force characteristics of the ethnic minorities, such as their unemployment rates, with those of the population as a whole. But identifying the social effects of any racial discrimination is too complex a matter to be calculated in terms of simple statistical ratios, useful though these are for some purposes.