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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, pursuant to his answer of 25 January to question 61017, for what reasons offences committed online are not recorded and what the estimated cost of keeping such records is.

The College of Policing Hate Crime Operational Guidance, issued in 2014, makes clear that hate crimes committed online should be recorded in the same way as all others: http://www.report-it.org.uk/strategy_and_guidance.

The Home Office is responsible for the collection and publication of data on police recorded crime, including hate crime. Information on whether a crime was committed online (in full or in part) has been collected on a mandatory basis since April 2015. The Home Office plans to publish information on the proportion of police recorded hate crime that is identified as being online in their Hate Crime England and Wales 2016/17 bulletin which is due for publication in October 2017