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 and Wales, hate crime data are collected and published by the Home Office, based on police data submissions. Prosecution data is collected and published by the Crown Prosecution Service. The Crime Survey of England and Wales includes regular victimization surveys to measure unreported hate crimes. In Northern Ireland, hate crime data are collected by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland. In Scotland, data are collected by the Procurator Fiscal and Police Scotland. . Police and prosecution data, which cover the reporting period from April to March of the following year, are regularly published.

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, thereby enabling the exchange of data about incidents recorded by each organization and providing a more holistic picture of hate crime.

Legislationline | TANDIS

SELECT YEAR

Official Data

Year	Hate crimes recorded by police	Prosecuted	Sentenced
2019	106672	14058	9340
2018	111076	18055	10817
2017	95552	14535	11987
2016	80,763	20,321	Not available
2015	62518	21300	13103

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 the Community Security Trust, Galop and Tell MAMA) exchange data on a regular basis about recorded incidents. This data sharing is governed by Information Sharing Agreements signed by the Police and each of the civil society organizations. As a result, some of the information presented below (particularly data on anti-Semitic hate crime and hate crime motivated by intolerance against Muslims) is also included in reporting by the abovementioned civil society organizations elsewhere on this page.

By bias motivation By type of crime

Download official data

National developments

A consultation was launched by the College of Policing to update the Hate Crime Operational Guidance on police hate crime recording.

In April 2020, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill was introduced to the Scottish Parliament and aims to (i) update the existing laws, (ii) combine most of the relevant laws into one Bill and (iii) add to the list of groups currently protected by hate crime laws.

International reports

Bias against Roma and Sinti

The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) published relevant recommendations in its 2019 Roma and Travellers Survey findings, "Roma and Travellers in six countries."