ONS mess

The nation’s official number-crunchers have been warned that their baffling “LGB+” label is spawning false claims across Whitehall.

In 2021, the Office for National Statistics introduced “LGB+” to describe people with a “minority sexual orientation”, a category it appears set to carry into the 2031 Census. LGB Alliance and The Lesbian Project have now written to the statistics body warning that the term is causing chaos and confusion in government and beyond.

An ONS finding that 3.2 per cent of UK adults are “LGB+” refers exclusively to sexual orientation. Yet the Department of Health and Social Care, the British Medical Association and numerous local authorities have reportedly presented the figure as including people who identify as transgender. The result is a rash of official publications and webpages confidently making a claim the statistic does not support.

“This is a disaster in the making, made worse by the fact the ONS has obviously failed to learn from its mistakes,” said Kate Barker, chief executive of LGB Alliance.

“After the 2021 debacle over sex and gender, the ONS should be focused on rebuilding trust in official statistics. Instead, it is further undermining its reputation through schoolboy category errors.”

Barker said it should have been obvious that “LGB+” would be confused with “LGBT+”, adding: “Given the widely publicised failures in 2021, it’s astonishing the ONS continues to make such indefensible statistical mistakes. It casts doubt on the veracity and accuracy of the whole 2031 Census.”

There is a more fundamental problem. By placing a plus sign after LGB, the ONS has created an official statistical category whose boundaries are left to the imagination. Does “minority sexual orientation” include furries, i.e. people with a predilection for dressing as cartoon animals? Does it include “asexuals” who claim to have no attraction to either sex? Arguably, either could shelter beneath the capacious plus sign.

The language also carries an unfortunate historical echo. The Paedophile Information Exchange was formed within the Scottish Minorities Group, apparently under the belief that paedophiles constituted another misunderstood sexual minority.

“For years, LGB people have warned about how the ‘+’ allows anyone to attach themselves to the category,” said Julie Bindel, co-director of The Lesbian Project. “This has done real damage. It prevents us from defining ourselves as a group and organising in our interests. We cannot even use official data to count ourselves, let alone understand the challenges LGB people face today.

“There is no other category in official statistics whose membership is left open to the user’s imagination. If the ONS wants to regain LGB people’s trust, it should scrap the misleading and statistically indefensible LGB+ and replace it with a clearly-defined category that everyone understands.”

Despite being the least sexy of government bodies, the ONS has made headlines multiple times over recent years. In guidance accompanying the 2021 Census, it allowed respondents to report their sex according to their self-identified gender. Campaign group Fair Play for Women successfully challenged the guidance in the High Court.

Then, in 2025, the government-commissioned Sullivan Review found that “gender” had increasingly replaced “sex” in official data collection. The confusion had serious consequences, including missed cancer referrals and overlooked criminal convictions.

After getting sex wrong in 2021, the ONS might have been expected to stop fannying about with fashionable labels and return to a basic rule of statistics: know what you are counting.