Originally published here.

In July 2017, the government launched a nationwide LGBT survey.1 The survey, which ran from July to October, asked LGBT and intersex people for their views on public services and about their experiences more generally living as a LGBT person in the UK. The survey received over 108,000 valid responses, making it the largest national survey to date of LGBT people anywhere in the world. This document provides a summary of the key findings from the survey. Alongside this report, we have published a more detailed analysis of the survey findings as well as a LGBT Action Plan that sets out how the government will address these findings.

Why we did the survey

Since 1967, when Parliament partially decriminalised male homosexual acts in England and Wales, the UK has made significant progress to advance equality for LGBT people. Recent milestones include bringing in the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013, which allowed samesex couples to marry, and introducing ‘Turing’s Law’ in the Policing and Crime Act 2017, which posthumously pardons men who were convicted for having sex with men prior to 1967 where the offence is no longer a crime. Our Parliament now has the highest proportion of openly lesbian, gay and bisexual members of any legislature in the world and we are consistently ranked as one of the best countries in Europe for LGBT rights. Despite this progress on legal entitlements, research and evidence has continued to suggest that LGBT people face discrimination, bullying and harassment in education, at work and on the streets, hate crime and higher inequalities in health satisfaction and outcomes.

Effective policymaking requires a sound evidence base. This means hearing directly from the people who are affected by policies. In 2015, the Government Equalities Office (GEO) commissioned the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) to conduct a wideranging, critical assessment of the evidence base regarding inequality experienced by LGBT people in the UK.2 We wanted to understand what the evidence was telling us so we could intervene where it matters most. The NIESR review found that “the evidence base for an effective assessment of inequality and relative disadvantage by sexual orientation and gender identity is deficient and has major gaps.” Further, it found there was a lack of research involving robust sample sizes that could look at different sexual orientations and gender identities at a more granular level. It also noted that national and administrative datasets tend not to hold LGBT-related data, limiting the government’s ability to understand how LGBT people were accessing public services and what their experiences were.

Yet despite the above, NIESR noted that the research tended to point in one direction – continued inequality for LGBT people in many areas of public life. In this context, the government launched a nationwide survey in July 2017. The survey was open to anyone over the age of 16 who was living in the UK and who identified as LGBT. The acronym ‘LGBT’ was used as an umbrella term; respondents could be from any minority sexual orientation (such as asexual or pansexual) or gender identity (such as non-binary or genderqueer). The survey was also open to individuals who have a variation in sex characteristics (intersex). The aim of the survey was to develop a better understanding of the experiences of LGBT and intersex people, particularly in the areas of health, education, personal safety and employment. These were chosen as the existing evidence suggested that they were the main areas where LGBT people face the largest inequalities.

Interpreting the findings

In total, we received 108,100 valid responses. A small number of responses that fell outside our target audience (i.e. from people under 16 or people who were not LGBT) were removed during the data-cleaning process. The survey also received 32,715 responses to an optional freetext question at the end of the survey. The GEO commissioned Ipsos MORI to analyse this rich qualitative data. Though the number of respondents to the survey was large, we still need to be careful when interpreting the data and extrapolating from the findings.

The sample was self-selected, and there is no guarantee that it was representative of the entire LGBT population in the UK. No robust and representative data of the LGBT population in the UK currently exists, although the Office for National Statistics is considering including a sexual orientation question in the 2021 census and is looking at options for producing gender identity population estimates. In addition, respondents had to be willing to self-identify as LGBT; these people may have a different experience to those who are unwilling to identify in this way, even in an anonymous survey.

THE RESULTS

In this section, we relay some of the headline findings from the survey and give them some context with wider evidence. The final section of this summary report considers the findings in a political context and sets out what steps the government will take as a response. Alongside this summary document, we have published a more detailed analysis of the survey findings. Who responded? The survey received 108,100 valid responses from individuals aged 16 or over who were living in the UK and self-identified as LGBT or intersex.

Sexual orientation: 61% of respondents identified as gay or lesbian and a quarter (26%) identified as bisexual. A small number identified as pansexual (4%), asexual (2%) and queer (1%).3 These figures varied by age. For example, younger respondents were more likely to identify as bisexual, asexual, pansexual, queer or ‘other’ (39% of cisgender4 respondents under 35 compared to 14% of cisgender respondents over 35). This reflects work undertaken by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) that shows younger people are more likely to be bisexual than older people.5 Gender identity 13% of the respondents were transgender (or trans). Of the total sample, 6.9% of respondents were non-binary (i.e. they identified as having a gender that was neither exclusively that of a man nor a woman), 3.5% were trans women (i.e. they had transitioned from man to woman at some point in their life) and 2.9% were trans men (i.e. they had transitioned from woman to man).

Younger trans respondents were more likely than older respondents to identify as non-binary. For example, 57% of trans respondents under 35 were non-binary compared with 36% of those aged 35 or over. Younger respondents were also more likely to be trans men (26% of trans respondents under 35 were trans men compared with 10% aged 35 or over) and less likely to be trans women (17% of trans respondents under 35 were trans women compared with 54% aged 35 or over). This age profile partly accords with the referral figures to the children and adolescent gender identity services where the majority of referrals in 2016-17 were for people assigned female at birth (1,400 of the 2,016 referrals – 69%).6 Other demographics Respondents were younger, on average, than the general UK population. Over two thirds (69%) of respondents were aged between 16 and 34; this compares with just under a third (31%) for the UK population as a whole.7 This is consistent with findings by the ONS that younger people are more likely to identify as LGB. In 2016, the ONS estimated that 2% of the UK population, or just over 1 million people, identify as having a minority sexual orientation. The proportion was higher for younger people (e.g. 4.1% of 16-24 year olds) than older people (e.g. 2.9% of 25 to 34 year olds and 0.7% of those aged 65 and over).8 These figures are about sexual orientation only, and not gender identity. Respondents were most likely to be resident in London (19% of respondents), the South East (15%) or the North West (12%) of England. 8% of respondents were from Scotland, 4% were from Wales and 2% were from Northern Ireland. The geographical distribution broadly replicates estimates from the ONS of where LGB people live that show, for example, that London has the highest proportion of LGB people in the UK.9 The ONS figures also estimate that 9% of the LGB population live in Scotland, 4% live in Wales and 2% live in Northern Ireland.

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