Babarinde’s proposal has been backed by some MPs in other parties, including Labour former deputy prime minister David Lammy and Conservative Sir James Cleverly, who quit the shadow cabinet this summer to run for London mayor.
The Eastbourne MP has previously told the BBC he put forward his bill in the wake of comments by former Conservative home secretary Suella Braverman, who defected to Reform UK earlier this year.
Braverman wrote in 2015, external that she was British Asian but said she “cannot claim to be English” despite being born and educated in England.
She has reaffirmed her position in recent weeks, writing on X that Englishness was “an ethnicity” and it was “not racist to say this”.
“To say I’m English is to take a ‘laissez-faire, anything-goes’ attitude to ethnicity, citizenship and identity. It also denies me my Asian heritage,” she added.
The detailed questions asked during the census in England and Wales are set out in legislation following recommendations from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The ONS told the BBC that the Government Statistical Service has been working on a new approach to asking about ethnicity in official surveys since 2022, with an update on the work due to be published on Thursday.
That could lead to a recommendation to change the ethnicity question at the 2031 census, although the questionnaire itself is normally designed much closer to the time the census is due to take place.
Legislation setting out the questions for the last census was published in summer 2020, ahead of it taking place in March the following year.
The Scottish government delayed the census in Scotland until 2022 because of the Covid pandemic.
