You asked:

I would like to be able to identify the levels of income for people in different categories of jobs by ethnicity. For instance within the IT sector I would like to know what the income is per ethnicity group.

We said:

Thank you for your request.

Information on earnings by ethnicity and sectoral breakdowns can be obtained from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). You may order special extracts and tabulations of Labour Force Survey (LFS) data from them (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate) by contacting the following; labour.market@ons.gov.uk or economic.advice@ons.gov.uk

We also make these datasets available to accredited and approved researchers via the UK Data Service and the ONS's Virtual Microdata Laboratory (https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/whatwedo/paidservices/virtualmicrodatalaboratoryvml).

We have produced an article on the 'ethnicity pay gap' which shows the difference in average hourly earnings for white/non-white groups. The analysis does not include sectoral breakdowns.

As this information is already available to you via this route we consider that s.21(1) applies to this request and the information does not have to be supplied under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. S.21(1) is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.