My 83 year old mother has just been filling in the form to get a bus pass. Of course they want a photo, which is fair enough, but why, oh why do they need to ask for her ethnicity?

No doubt someone, somewhere is being paid to collect the statistics and present pretty graphs to others, who are probably being overpaid for doing unnecessary jobs, so that they can prove that they have done their job and pick up their pay checks at the end of the month. Racism as a job creation scheme.