Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to tackle transphobic hate crime.

The Government takes all forms of hate crime seriously. We expect the police to investigate these hateful attacks and make sure the cowards who commit them feel the full force of the law.

We also welcome the apparent greater willingness to report hate crimes to the police and that the police are better at identifying them. That helps to explain the increase seen in hate crime.

Our absolute priority is to get more police into our streets, cut crime, protect the public and bring more criminals to justice. We are supporting police by providing them with the resources they need. This has included the recruitment of 20,000 extra police officers.

The Government has also worked with the police to fund True Vision, an online hate crime reporting portal, designed so that victims of hate crime do not have to visit a police station to report. The Government also funds the National Online Hate Crime Hub, a central capability designed to support individual local police forces in dealing with online hate crime. The Hub provides expert advice to police forces to support them in investigating these offences.