Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of the implications for her Department’s policies of the report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Sikhs entitled Anti-Sikh Hate Crime Report, published in October 2020.

We welcome the Sikh Guard initiative, a third-party reporting service specifically for the Sikh Community. 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. As a part of this, True Vision has been working with the Sikh Guard (established by the National Sikh Police Association) and Rakkha initiatives to encourage reporting from within Sikh communities.

The Government also funds the National Online Hate Crime Hub, which supports individual local police forces in dealing specifically with online hate crime. The Hub provides expert advice to police forces to support them in investigating these abhorrent offences.