A message from the National Statistician Sir Ian Diamond for LGBTQ+ History Month

This week is the start of LGBTQ+ History Month, an important time to mark the diversity in our community, and the efforts of all those who have worked tirelessly, and sometimes with great sacrifice, to create a more inclusive society.

Inclusivity is something that sits at the very heart of our strategy for UK statistics. It’s also vital in creating an organisation in which everyone feels they can bring their whole selves to work. I am incredibly proud of the work our colleagues in the LGBTQ+ and Allies Network and our Inclusion team do to create a safe and welcoming environment for all our colleagues.

We are also striving to be more inclusive in our data so that all in our society are represented and we can be confident the full experiences of everyone in our communities are evident in our statistics.

I eagerly await the release of the first outputs from the 2021 census from late May this year, when we will be able to start telling that story in much greater detail. A huge amount of effort went into designing the questions that will give us much richer data on sexual orientation and gender identity and help us to analyse the lived experiences of citizens in a way that we have never been able to do so before.

Our Deputy Director of Statistical Coherence and Inclusion Division, Debra Prestwood, has written  a blog post on our ambitious and radical plans to make data more representative in response to the recommendations from the UK Inclusive Data Taskforce.

While we collect and analyse more detailed data from across the nation to better understand the needs of those in our communities, we also need to do the same for those in our organisation. We will be using anonymised and aggregated data from our internal systems to give us valuable insight into how representative we are and understand how we can do more to better support the LGBTQ+ community at the ONS.

Sir Ian Diamond, National Statistician