Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment he has made of trends in the level of hate crime targeted at LGBT+ people in (a) Wales and (b) Newport West constituency.

The Government is pleased to see the overall reduction in police-recorded hate crime across forces in England and Wales in the year ending March 2023, including a 6% reduction in sexual orientation hate crimes. Whilst an 11% increase in transgender hate crime was seen, and this may partly be due to a genuine rise, the biggest driver is likely to be general improvements in police recording along with increased victim willingness to come forward. We are clear that any instance is one too many and we remain committed to tackling these appalling offences. We are supporting the police by providing them with the resources they need.

Part of this necessitates police recruitment and training – there are over 149,000 officers in England and Wales, which is higher than the previous peak before the Police Uplift Programme, in March 2010. Wales as a whole now has 8,108 officers (headcount as at 30 September 2023). Funding for Wales will be up to £936.4m in 2024/25, an increase of up to £56m when compared to 2023/24.

Gwent specifically now has 1,527 officers (headcount as at 30 September 2023). Funding for Gwent will be £179.8 million in 2024/25, an increase of up to £10.7 million when compared to 2023/24. The Government continues to fund True Vision, an online hate crime reporting portal, designed so that victims of all forms of hate crime do not have to visit a police station to report. We also fund the National Online Hate Crime Hub, a central capability designed to provide expert advice to support individual local police forces in dealing with online hate crime.

The Government is providing over £3m of funding, between 10 August 2021 and 31 March 2024, to five anti-bullying organisations to support schools to tackle bullying. This includes projects targeting hate-related bullying and homophobic, biphobic and transphobic based bullying.