Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what information her Department holds on the number of racist (a) incidents and (b) crimes occurring during electoral campaigns in each year from 2012.

The Home Office holds annual data on the number of racist hate crimes and incidents in England and Wales. We do not hold specific data relating to electoral campaigns.

In the most recent hate crime statistical bulletin, ‘Hate Crime, England and Wales, 2015/16’, an Annex was included on the level of racially or religiously aggravated offences around the time of the EU Referendum. This analysis, based on 31 forces who supplied detailed data to the Home Office Data Hub, showed that there was an increase in the number of these offences following the announcement of the referendum result. This publication is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hate-crime-england-and-wales-2015-to-2016