The term BAME should not be used by companies or public bodies any more, an independent racial disparities commission is reportedly set to recommend this week.
According the Telegraph , axing the acronym - Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic - is among proposals in a new report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.
The commission, which is chaired by Dr Tony Sewell, was set up last year by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s death in the US. It is due to publish its findings this week.
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One of the commission's reported concerns is that the term BAME masks a far more complex picture of the lived experiences of different ethnic groups.
According to a source in the Telegraph, the widely-used term has become "unhelpful and redundant".
The official Government website says it does not use the terms BAME or BME (Black and minority ethnic) because “they include some groups and not others” and are “not well understood” in user research.
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Labour's shadow justice secretary David Lammy, who has been a major critic of the term BAME, questioned on Twitter what the Government would replace the label with.
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He wrote: “Easy for the government to catch up with the rest of us on scrapping the term BAME? But what are they going to replace it with exactly?”
Government minister Nigel Huddleston told Sky News : "We've got to be sensitive to treat people as individuals and sometimes categorisations can be challenging or indeed offensive, even if they're not intended to be so.
"We will have to wait and see what the government come forward with this new commission."