This is an Official Statistics bulletin produced by statisticians in the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and the Office for National Statistics. It brings together a range of official statistics on hate crime from across the crime and criminal justice system, as well as the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW).

Including data from various sources in a joint publication makes it easier for users to find the information they need without having to compile it from different statistical publications. This publication allows the Government and users to examine the levels of hate crime and reporting and patterns of offending and will help Police and Crime Commissioners, police forces and other criminal justice agencies to focus their resources appropriately.

Hate crime is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic’. The five monitored strands are race, religion/faith, sexual orientation, disability, and gender-identity. Crimes based on hostility to age, gender, or appearance, for example, can also be hate crimes, although they are not part of the five centrally monitored strands.

The report provides estimates from the CSEW on the level of hate crime in England and Wales, as well as information on the victims’ experience of hate crime and whether they told the police about the hate crimes.

Information from the police covers the number of crimes which were ‘flagged’ by the police, during the process of recording crime, as being motivated by one or more of the five centrally monitored strands, how the police dealt these offences, and what types of hate crime offences the police recorded.

More detailed information is available for racially or religiously aggravated offences, as defined by statute, which form a subset of total police recorded ‘flagged’ hate crimes. Information is presented from police recording through to court outcomes, including sentences handed out in court. These aggravated offences accounted for over 80 per cent of the racially or religiously motivated ‘flagged’ hate crimes recorded by the police in 2012 to 2013.

This publication provides information on the number of hate crimes from police recorded data in England and Wales from April 2019 to March 2020. The bulletin covers the extent and trends in hate crime for all forces, with additional analysis based upon more detailed data supplied by 31 police forces on the types of offences associated with hate crime.

Hate crime is defined 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.’ There are five centrally monitored strands of hate crime:

• race or ethnicity
• religion or beliefs
• sexual orientation
• disability
• transgender identity

The publication includes estimates on the number of hate crime incidents from the Crime Survey for England and Wales for the combined survey years of year ending March 2018, year ending March 2019 and year ending March 2020.

Please note that it has come to our attention that table 5.16 of Court Proceedings was incorrect when originally published. This table has now been replaced with a corrected version.

The annual release, presented on a calendar year basis, covers offenders dealt with by formal police cautions, reprimands or warning, or criminal court proceedings in England and Wales.

The order of chapters follows the flow of cases through the criminal justice system. As in previous years, more detailed data for the calendar year covered are published separately in six volumes of supplementary tables.

Court level sentencing data are now available for the first time as part of the commitments made in the Ministry of Justice’s Structural Reform Plan, in accordance with public data principles. The data will provide members of the public with information about what happened in their court and the sentences given.

The report is released by the Ministry of Justice and produced in accordance with arrangements provided by the UK Statistics Authority.

The Criminal statistics, England and Wales 2009 were published on 21 October 2010.

The supplementary tables (Excel spreadsheets in zip files) were published on 21 October 2010.

http://www.justice.gov.uk/statistics/previous-stats/sentencing-annual">Sentencing Statistics (annual) (NS)

Changes to the statistics were published on 20 October 2010.

Previous issues

http://www.justice.gov.uk/statistics/previous-stats/archive">Criminal statistics annual report archive

Please email the web team if you have difficulty opening the zipped files.

The bulletin is produced and handled by the ministry’s analytical professionals and production staff. Pre-release access of up to 24 hours is granted to the following persons:

Ministry of Justice: Secretary of State; Minister for Criminal Justice; Minister of State; Permanent Secretary; Special Adviser; Director General, Criminal Justice Group; Head of Better Trials Unit; four policy advisors; Director of Analytical Services; two sentencing policy managers; Senior Press Officer; four press officers; Strategic Communications Advisor; Head of Fairness and Confidence Unit; Director Criminal Policy, Head of Justice Team; Head of Community Confidence Team; Strategy Manager.

Home Office: Home Secretary; Permanent Secretary; Minister for Police and Crime Reduction; Head of Crime Strategy; Head of Violent Crime Unit; Head of Crime Strategy; Press Officer; Chief Statistician.

Attorney General’s Office: Attorney General; Solicitor General; Senior Policy Official.

Crown Prosecution Service: Press Officer.

Sentencing Council: Chairman of the Sentencing Council

The Judiciary: Lord Chief Justice; Senior Presiding Judge

Home Office Statistical Bulletin 08/12 presents police recorded crime statistics on the levels and trends in detections and detection rates in England & Wales for the financial year 2011/12.

The bulletin focuses on sanction detections where the offender receives some formal sanction such as being charged or summonsed, cautioned, reprimanded or given a final warning. Sanction detections also include penalty notices for disorder, warnings for cannabis possession and offences which are asked to be taken into consideration by a court.

Longer term datasets contain https://data.gov.uk/dataset/0e26ee1b-26b7-406e-a3b1-f3481b324977/local-police-recorded-crime-data">police recorded crime for police force areas and local authorities.