Statistics on hate crime convictions and sentences in England and Wales 2009 - 2023
Request
Please supply statistics on hate crime convictions and sentences in England and Wales 2009 - 2023. Broken down by convictions, sentences and duration of sentence broken down by protected category as per the 2010 EA.
I would like to know how many people were convicted of a hate crime under the 'Public Order' acts in England and Wales between 2009 and 2023, found guilty and sentenced and what that the sentence was i.e. how many years? Importantly I would like to know the offence type i.e. assault with injury, assault without injury, sexual assault, homicide (murder and manslaughter) the conviction, sentence and sentence, against offence type.
Response
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does not collate and record all the data sought within the scope of your request.
To assist, during the time period requested, the CPS obtained convictions in respect of 163,551 defendants ‘flagged’ with the hate crime monitoring flag covering the 12 Principal Offence Categories.
Section 12(1) of the FOIA means public authorities are not obliged to comply with a request for information if it estimates the cost of complying would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit for central government is set at £600. This means that the appropriate limit will be exceeded if it would require more than 24 hours work in determining whether the CPS holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information.
To identify any sentencing data concerning those convictions would require a manual review of all the case files referred to above and we believe that the cost of manually reviewing the 163,551 defendants case files to ascertain that specific information alone would exceed the appropriate limit. Consequently, we are not obliged to comply with this aspect of your request.
However, under section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act we have an obligation to advise what, if any information may assist you with your request.
As alluded to above we can provide the volume of convictions for flagged hate crime defendants by the 12 Principal Offence Categories but not convictions data for hate crime flagged prosecutions by individual offence. In addition, I note that your request includes a request for the ‘protected category’ (characteristic). The data can also be broken down by sex, age band and self-defined ethnicity.
The attached excel spreadsheet labelled ‘12957 DATA’ therefore shows for hate crime flagged convictions from 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2023 (for England and Wales - CPS National):
The Principal Offence Category
Sex
Age Band
Self-defined ethnicity
Please note the caveats appended to that disclosure when considering the data.
Finally, with regards to sentencing, the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) are the official statistics holders of sentences imposed by the courts and they publish defendant data by specific offence. You therefore may wish to submit a Freedom of Information request to them via the email address below: