Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department has asked the Office for National Statistics to use anonymised person-level data from the 2021 census to help improve the accuracy of data on the (a) ethnicity and (b) religion of victims of hate crime offences.

The Home Office publishes official statistics on hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales. This includes information on religious hate crimes, by targeted religion, including rates per population. These are calculated using population data from the 2021 Census.

There have not been discussions with the ONS on the feasibility of linking Census data to hate crime data, this is something the Home Office is keen to explore.

The latest statistical bulletin can be found here: Hate crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2025 - GOV.UK