Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment he has made of the reasons for the 12 per cent rise in recorded hate crimes in the West Midlands in the last year, and if he will make a statement.

It is for Police and Crime Commissioners, with their Chief Constables, to consider hate crime trends for their local areas.

In England and Wales, the most recently published statistics on police recorded hate crime, for 2016/17, showed that there were 80,393 offences recorded by the police in which one or more hate crime strands were deemed to be a motivating factor. This was an increase of 29% compared with the 62,518 hate crimes recorded in 2015/16.

The 29% increase is thought to reflect both a genuine rise in hate crime around the time of the EU Referendum and Westminster Bridge terrorist attack alongside improved identification of hate crime by the police, willingness of victims to come forward and an overall improvement in how police now record crime.