Peers have voted to scrap non-crime hate incidents almost five months after the Metropolitan Police announced its decision to cease investigating them.
Lord Toby Young of Acton formally proposed their abolition as part of the ongoing Crime and Policing Bill, a legislative piece that still requires further parliamentary scrutiny before it can become law.
These incidents are broadly defined as acts appearing motivated by hostility towards individuals based on specific protected characteristics – such as race, religion, disability, or gender – but which ultimately do not constitute a criminal offence.
London’s Met Police last year confirmed it would no longer investigate such cases, notably after dropping a high-profile probe into social media posts concerning transgender issues by Father Ted creator Graham Linehan.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood earlier this year told The Telegraph she would “expect to see” non-crime hate incidents “changed, absolutely”.
She added: “The question is, what do you do instead?”
Moving his amendment on Wednesday, which peers backed by 227 votes to 221, majority six, Lord Young said: “Placing a statutory limit on what non-crimes the police can investigate you for and record against your name is not just in the interests of my noble friends on this side of the House (the Conservatives), some of whom have had non-crime hate incidents recorded against them, it’s in the interests of then noble Lords opposite (Labour) and the Liberal Democrats.
“Remember, the political wind can change.
“It is in your interests to place a statutory limit on what the police can investigate and record as non-crimes, it’s in all of our interests.
“It really should be put on a statutory footing.”
As part of the Conservative peer’s proposal, police authorities would be banned from processing personal data to record non-crime hate incidents, but officers would still be able to look at information “relevant for the prevention and detection of a crime”.
Forces would also need to purge their files of non-crime hate incident records which fall below a certain threshold, when they are discovered, and not release information as part of Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks.
Non-crime hate incidents were introduced after the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and an inquiry into his death, setting up a system for reporting and recording racist incidents and crimes.
His mother, Labour peer Baroness Doreen Lawrence of Clarendon, said: “It depends on how you see non-crime hate and it depends on who’s at the receiving end of that.
“Now for me, it led to the murder of my son.
“Now, individuals who think they’ve got the right to walk around and talk about, especially, young black men in a certain way, what starts off as just verbal, it leads to violence.”
Debating the proposal on Monday, Lady Lawrence added: “How do you move forward if it moves from verbal into violence and you have no way of tracking back where it started from?”
She urged peers to consider “what implication” abandoning the non-crime hate regime could have.
Lord Young replied verbal abuse would still “meet the new recording threshold” for anti-social behaviour and said he had “no objection to that kind of thing being recorded”.
He continued: “I just want to exclude the more trivial things from being recorded and having the police waste so much time on them.”
Home Office minister Lord David Hanson of Flint said the Government had already commissioned a review into non-crime hate incidents.
“So we have taken action,” he said, adding: “We’re trying to change that regime.”
Lord Hanson said: “We want to ensure that we keep the essence of what that regime was originally established for.”
This, he added, was “to gather information, to prevent crime, to understand tensions, to look at potential areas where tensions could rise, to support investigations, and to safeguard the vulnerable”, which “remains as relevant today as it did 30 years ago”.
Turning to the DBS check rules which Lord Young proposed, Lord Hanson said: “It is ultimately for chief officers to determine whether the non-conviction information should be disclosed, in-line with statutory guidance issued by the Home Office reflecting the sensitive nature of the information.
“I don’t believe it’s appropriate for us to tie officers’ hands to apply a prohibition on disclosing information which may be relevant about individuals who choose to work with the most vulnerable in our society.”
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