Ulster Scots (Hansard, 23 February 2004)

The information requested falls within the responsibility of the National Statistician, who has been asked to reply.

Letter from the National Statistician, Mr Len Cook, to Lord Laird, dated 23 February 2004.

As National Statistician I have been asked to reply to your recent Parliamentary Question about whether the Office for National Statistics treats Ulster Scots as a separate ethnic group (HL1326).

There is no single ethnic classification which is used throughout the UK. National Statistics guidance "A guide for the collection and classification of ethnicity data" has recently been published and this recommends ethnic group classifications based on those used in the 2001 Census. However, both Scotland and Northern Ireland used different ethnic group classifications on their censuses from that used in England and Wales and this is reflected in the guidance. This reply relates to the classification used in England and Wales only. The classifications used in Scotland and Northen Ireland are the responsibility of the Scottish Executive and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency respectively.

23WA

The guidance does not recommend the use of a separate "Ulster Scots" category when asking questions on either ethnicity or national identity in England and Wales. However, it does recommend that there is always an option for people to describe their ethnicity or national identity in their own words.

A central principle of the National Statistics guidance on ethnicity and identity is that people should be able to choose a category that adequately describes them. However, it would be impossible to list every possible ethnic category in our classification, since the list would become too long and unwieldy. Moreover the data collected from any sample survey would not be useable in practice because each category would contain too few people for us to be able to carry out meaningful statistical analyses. Instead we have listed a limited number of categories which reflect and distinguish between the significant groups present in England and Wales today.

The 2001 Census in England and Wales did not include a separate tick box for "Ulster Scots" at the ethnicity question. There was however the opportunity for people to write in their own answers if they felt none of the tick box options were suitable. Everyone who wrote in "Ulster Scots" was counted separately. In England and Wales a total of 56 people described their ethnicity in this way.