Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment his Department has made of trends in the level of reported online abuse towards people with disabilities.

In October 2018 the Government published data on online hate crime, which shows an increase in online disability hate crime recorded by the police between 2016/17 and 2017/18 (from 140 to 225). It is likely that the figures under represent levels of online hate crime towards people with disabilities and do not cover online abuse that does not meet the criminal threshold.

The forthcoming Online Harms White Paper will set out legislative measures to tackle the full range of online harms, including online abuse. We will continue to engage with the disabled community and other stakeholders as we develop our proposals.