Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department has estimated the number of hate crimes reported on university property in the 2016-17 academic year.

The government takes all forms of hate crime extremely seriously. There is no place in our society - including within higher education – for hatred or any form of harassment, discrimination or racism.

Information on the number of hate crimes on university property in the 2016-17 academic year is not held centrally.

The Universities UK Harassment and Hate Crime Taskforce, which was set up in September 2015 at the government’s request, makes a number of recommendations on tackling harassment and hate crime on campus, including on improving reporting rates and mechanisms for disclosure in higher education providers. These include, that relevant internal and external support should be signposted, and that reporting procedures should be centralised, accessible, and allow for anonymity if preferred, as well as enabling accurate data to be captured to determine the scale of a problem and track year on-year trends. The government expects higher education providers to take these recommendations seriously and to have robust policies and procedures in place to investigate and address hate crime.

To support providers in implementing the Taskforce’s recommendations, the Office for Students is supporting and evaluating over 100 safeguarding projects to the value of £4.5 million. This includes 63 projects to improve responses to hate crime and online harassment on campus, and 11 to tackle religious-based hate crime.