Asked by: Stephen Timms (Labour - East Ham)
Question to the Attorney General:
To ask the Attorney General, what recent progress has been made in increasing the prosecution rate for hate crimes.
Answered by Robert Buckland
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has taken a number of steps to improve its prosecution of all strands of hate crime.
The CPS is prosecuting and convicting more defendants of hate crime than ever before. In 2015/16, the CPS completed 15,442 hate crime prosecutions, an increase of 704 on the previous year. The conviction rate also improved to 83.2% in 2015/16 an increase from 82.9% the previous year.
The CPS Annual Report and Accounts 2016/17 shows that the proportion of cases where the CPS was successful in achieving uplifted sentences for hate crime perpetrators has increased dramatically. The proportion rose from 33.8% in 2015/16, to 52.2% in 2016/17 – reaching 58.2% in the final quarter.
The CPS has delivered mandatory face to face disability hate crime training and racially and religiously aggravated hate crime training and is in the process of developing homophobic, biphobic and transphobic hate crime training to support prosecutors to more effectively deal with hate crime cases.