Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of the implications for his Department's policies of the conclusions of the Tell MAMA Annual Report for 2016 on Anti-Muslim Hatred on the gender of victims and the majority identity of perpetrators of such hatred.

We take hate crime in all its forms very seriously: the United Kingdom has some of the strongest hate crime legislation in the world. The statistical breakdowns provided by Tell MAMA give an invaluable insight into the extent and nature of the deplorable abuse which Muslim citizens are subjected to on account of their belief or appearance. It is notable that most reported offline incidents of anti-Muslim hatred involve male perpetrators and that the majority of victims of offline incidents are women, most of whom are visibly Muslim. The Government has committed funding of £100 million to counter violence against women and girls with prosecutions and convictions for such offences rising 63 per cent since 2007-08.

This Government has done more than any other to tackle anti-Muslim hatred. We set up the first ever cross-government working group on anti-Muslim hatred. We have funded Tell MAMA, the first service to record incidents, support victims and raise community awareness of how to report anti-Muslim hate incidents. We are also disaggregating religious hate crime data held by the police to reveal the true scale and nature of the problem. Funding has been made available for the security of mosques and other faith establishments.