Could the end of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) be in sight? As the head of the Free Speech Union, I’ve been campaigning for their abolition for five years and there was a breakthrough this week with the Conservatives unveiling a plan to scrap them. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, is going to table an amendment to Labour’s Crime and Policing Bill that would make it illegal in almost all circumstances for the police to collect or retain personal data relating to hate incidents where no laws have been broken.
For those unfamiliar with this Orwellian concept, an NCHI is a record the police make when someone accuses you of a ‘hate crime’ and they can find no evidence a crime has been committed. That sounds odd. Why would the police bother to record ‘non-crimes’ when there are so many actual crimes they could investigate? It’s even odder when you consider some of the reports the police have followed up, such as the man in Bedfordshire who ended up with an NCHI recorded against him after his neighbour told the police he started whistling the theme tune to Bob the Builder whenever he saw him.
If such incidents were a rarity, perhaps it wouldn’t matter. But according to Freedom of Information requests submitted by the Telegraph, 119,934 were recorded between 2014 and 2019, an average of 65 a day. A statutory code of practice was issued in 2023 designed to get the police to use more common sense when it comes to NCHIs, but data obtained by the Free Speech Union shows the new guidance is being ignored. In some areas, the number being recorded has actually gone up since 2023.
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