Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he is taking to help reduce levels of (a) homophobic, (b) biphobic and (c) transphobic hate crimes.

The Government is clear that all forms of hate crime - including homophobic, biphobic and transphobic hate crime - are completely unacceptable. We have a robust legislative framework in place and expect the police fully to investigate these abhorrent offences and make sure those who commit them feel the full force of the law.

Our absolute priority is to get more police onto 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, including having recruited 20,000 additional police officers by March 2023.

The Government has 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. We also fund 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.

The Government Equality Hub is providing over £3m of funding, between August 2021 and March 2024, to five anti-bullying organisations to support schools to tackle bullying. This includes projects targeting bullying of particular groups, including those who are victims of hate-related bullying and homophobic, biphobic and transphobic based bullying.

The Government has also made hate crime a “priority offence” in the Online Safety Act, which received Royal Assent on 26 October. Under new legal duties of care, technology companies will need to prevent, identify and remove illegal content and activity online. This means less illegal content - including content that incites hate on the grounds of race, religion or sexual orientation - will appear online and, when it does, it will be removed more quickly.