Mr. Gerard Brophy:

We have to be really careful. We want to have best practice. Some organisations already have that best practice in place. We have learned from that. We had to do a data protection impact assessment on it. We had to talk to the Traveller community we work with. We also need to be sure we train our own workers so that, when they record ethnicity, they do so at the person's choice. If you ask somebody what ethnicity they are, it could be double Dutch to some people. It is about explaining what the choices are and why we want to record it and retain that information. People may well make the choice that they do not want us not to record anything about them because they are afraid they are going to be discriminated against if they are recorded as a Traveller. In our previous systems we had the ability to record nationality and some ethnicity, but we found it was not reliable because someone might select an ethnicity for somebody which they may not be happy with. We have taken a very careful approach to this. We want to roll this out with training. Some organisations have done this very successfully and have really useful data coming forward.