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.