United Kingdom
The United Kingdom regularly reports hate crime data to ODIHR. The United Kingdom's hate crime laws are a combination of general penalty-enhancement provisions and substantive offences. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, hate crime data are collected by the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Home Office. In Scotland, data are collected by the Procurator Fiscal. Police and prosecution data, which cover the reporting period from April to March of the following year, are regularly published. The United Kingdom conducts regular victimization surveys to measure unreported hate crimes.
How hate crime data is collected
Hate crime is defined by the United Kingdom as "any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic." This common definition was agreed in 2007 by the police, Crown Prosecution Service, Prison Service (now the National Offender Management Service) and other agencies that make up the criminal justice system. There are five centrally monitored strands of hate crime: (i) race or ethnicity; (ii) religion or beliefs; (iii) sexual orientation; (iv) disability; and (v) transgender identity.
When recording a crime, police can flag an offence as being motivated by one or more of the five monitored strands listed above (for example, an offence can be motivated by hostility towards the victim's race and religion). The College of Policing provided operational guidance in 2014 to police forces around hate crime, including information on what can be covered by race hate crime. The guidance stated: "Race hate crime can include any group defined by race, colour, nationality or ethnic or national origin, including countries within the UK, and Gypsy or Irish Travellers. It automatically includes a person who is targeted because they are an asylum seeker or refugee as this is intrinsically linked to their ethnicity and origins. Policy and legislation takes a 'human rights' approach and covers majority as well as minority groups." This means that offences with a xenophobic element (such as graffiti targeting certain nationalities) can be recorded as race hate crimes by the police.
An offence may be motivated by hatred towards a characteristic (strand) that is not centrally monitored and therefore would not be part of the data in this statistical bulletin (age or gender for example). Operationally, such an offence could still be investigated as a hate crime by the police. As well as recording the overall number of hate crimes, the police also collect data on the number of motivating factors by strand.
The Police and two civil society organizations involved in monitoring hate incidents (Community Security Trust and Tell MAMA) have entered into Information Sharing Agreements, which enable the exchange of data about the incidents each of the entities registered, and thus a more holistic picture of hate crime for all.
Official Data
Hate crimes recorded by police
The disaggregated data below are for England and Wales only. The Police and several civil society organizations involved in monitoring hate incidents (including Community Security Trust, Galop and Tell MAMA) are on a regular basis exchanging data about the recorded incidents. This data sharing is governed by the Information Sharing Agreements signed between the Police and each of the civil society organizations. As a result, some of the information presented below as part of the official monitoring of hate crimes (particularly data on anti-Semitic hate crime and hate crime motivated by intolerance against Muslims) is also included in the reporting by the above mentioned civil society organizations elsewhere on this page.
National developments
In July 2016, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice published an action plan on hate crime entitled Action Against Hate: The UK Government's plan for Tackling Hate Crime.
In October, the Crown Prosecution Service published revised guidelines on prosecuting cases involving communications sent via social media, which now includes a section on hate crime to equip prosecutors to address these cases.
In August 2017, as part of its #HateCrimeMatters campaign, the Crown Prosecution Service published Public Policy Statements and Legal Guidance on the monitored strands of hate crime.
International reports
No information is available.
Key observation
ODIHR observes that the United Kingdom has met most OSCE commitments on hate crime data collection and reporting.
