Non-Crime Hate Incidents should be abolished

y Lords, I draw attention to my declaration in the register of interests that I am chair of the College of Policing.

As I said at Second Reading, we need to remember that there were benign reasons for the introduction of this regime over three decades ago; what the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said in this regard was helpful. The purpose was to ensure that the police would pursue intelligence that could build a pattern of behaviour that would result in harm to an individual. That was the case not just in relation to the dreadful murder of Stephen Lawrence but subsequently in the case of Fiona Pilkington, where a repeated pattern of anti-social behaviour had been ignored. It was not criminal behaviour—it fell below that threshold—but it nevertheless resulted in a tragic loss of life.

Nevertheless, as has been noted, there has been considerable change over that three decades, with the advent of social media, smartphones and a much more contested policy space in many of the areas relating to hate crimes or alleged hate crimes. There is the risk of a number of consequences. Those have been drawn attention to by noble Lords, but they include the chilling effect on free speech, the tying up of resources unnecessarily —I will come to that—and, I suggest, at least as serious, damage to the reputation of the police, if it is perceived that they are prioritising the wrong things and getting themselves involved in matters that they should not be.

For all those reasons, in July last year, the College of Policing, at my instigation, together with the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the Home Office, agreed the terms of reference for a review of the non-crime hate incident regime. An interim report was published in October 2025. It is available to read, but the conclusion was that the regime is not fit for purpose. The final report will go to the Home Secretary shortly and it will then, I must emphasise, be a matter for the Home Secretary to decide what the new regime should look like.

In short, the report proposes to end the use of police crime systems for recording non-crime incidents. That effectively abolishes the regime of non-crime hate incidents altogether. Incidents recorded as anti-social behaviour hostility would be recorded on intelligence systems, but only if they meet a very high threshold where there is genuine harm or risk within communities. The totality of that change would free up resources; it would prevent the police being drawn into areas that they should not be. It would, in short, be a sea-change in the way in which these matters are dealt with, and it would see an end to the current regime of non-crime hate incidents entirely.

I believe that there is a considerable amount of common ground in this matter. There is the issue that my noble friend Lord Young of Acton raised, in relation to record retention. He suggested that those non-crime hate incidents that have currently been recorded should immediately be removed. That, I must emphasise, would be a matter for the Home Office to decide, although that has not happened in relation to previous changes of criminal offences.

I should emphasise that the threshold for disclosure in relation to enhanced DBS checks, which was the particular concern that my noble friend raised, is exceptionally high. We know that fewer than 1% of DBS certificates currently include non-conviction data at all. In the review, we have so far been entirely unable to discover any incidence of a non-crime hate incident being disclosed for the purpose of an enhanced DBS check. So, although there is a suggested risk, it does not appear that it is a substantive risk, because of the bar being so high.

I want to note that non-crime hate incidents form a tiny part of the non-crime demand that is placed on the police service. In the review, 33 forces were looked at and it was discovered that, last year, there were something over 7,000 non-crime hate incidents recorded by those forces—which accords with the figures that have been suggested by my noble friend and others—for the entirety of policing. That compares with over 1 million incidents of anti-social behaviour recorded by the police. Those are not crimes, either, but it was nevertheless deemed important that they were noted. It is less than 1% of that number, and the Metropolitan Police, who have now said that they will no longer investigate non-crime hate incidents, say that those incidents account for 0.05% of their overall demand.

So it is important that we understand this in context. One prominent politician has used the catchphrase that the police should be “policing the streets and not tweets”. That is a very good phrase, but I do not think it is the case that, in the main, the police are doing that. There have been some examples of clumsy police action in relation to social media. Some of those examples do not relate to non-crime hate incidents at all.

The example that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, raised in relation to the comedian Graham Linehan, was not a non-crime hate incident. It was an investigation of a hate crime. Whether that investigation and the interview of Mr Linehan were appropriate is another matter entirely, but it was not a non-crime hate incident. Nor was the notorious incident where police knocked on the door of a Daily Telegraph journalist, Allison Pearson, on Remembrance Sunday. Whatever the merits of the police doing that—and I suggest that it was extremely unwise—it was not a non-crime hate incident that they were investigating.

Sometimes, the perceived ills of policing and the failure in many circumstances to attend to the kinds of issues that they should be attending to—that issue has been raised as well—are often laid at the door of the regime of non-crime hate incidents. I suggest that that is disproportionate but nevertheless damaging in terms of the perception of the police and their priorities.

That is why it is so important that this regime should fundamentally be changed, and it is why I think the thrust of my noble friend Lord Young’s amendment —that the regime should be abolished and a better one put in place—is correct. But I will just conclude by emphasising that it is important that the police are able to track patterns of hate that may be emerging in communities that threaten those communities and individuals with harm.

If any of us had any doubt about that, we should consider an issue that has been preoccupying this House, which is the rise of antisemitism and the importance of picking that up and ensuring that individuals are not targeted and that they are prevented from harm. It was precisely that kind of rising hate that this regime was originally put in place to prevent.

It is perfectly possible to take sensible steps to have an entirely different and new regime that will see these matters dealt with properly and will remove the police from getting involved in matters that I do not believe they want to be involved in. But do not let us throw out the baby with the bathwater or believe that the police should not, in some circumstances but far fewer that we have now, be recording matters that are drawn to their attention where hatred is involved.

I emphasise finally that these are matters for the Government, ultimately, in my view, to decide. I therefore look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.