“The police should have only one overriding priority: catching criminals and protecting the public from crime. This emphatically does not extend to acting as the thought police or intervening when someone makes an off-colour remark online.”
The Conservative Party has pledged to abolish so-called non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs), branding them a waste of police time and a threat to free speech.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp has announced his party will table an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to do just that, drawing a stark line between the Tories and Labour over the issue.
Writing in The Telegraph, Mr Philp said his party would force a vote on the issue to make it “clear which MPs are willing to stand up for common sense, getting police priorities straight and for free speech – and which MPs are not”.
“The police,” he continued, “should have only one overriding priority: catching criminals and protecting the public from crime. This emphatically does not extend to acting as the thought police or intervening when someone makes an off-colour remark online.”
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch was even more forthright, declaring that NCHIs have “wasted police time chasing ideology and grievance instead of justice”.
The move has been welcomed by the Free Speech Union (FSU), which has long criticised the recording of NCHIs. These incidents, which do not involve criminal activity but are perceived to be motivated by hostility, were introduced by police forces in the early 2000s following the Stephen Lawrence inquiry.
While Mr Philp acknowledged that “where hatred is such that it is likely to lead to an actual crime, then there is a good case for police taking an interest,” he warned that “over the years, NCHIs have expanded beyond all recognition and have strayed far from this original intention”.
The issue came into sharper focus in 2014 when the College of Policing published its Hate Crime Operational Guidance. This formalised the idea of NCHIs being recorded against individuals’ names – even when no crime had been committed.
According to the guidance, an NCHI is “any non-crime incident which is perceived by the victim or any bystanders to be motivated by hostility or prejudice” based on protected characteristics like race, religion or gender identity. Crucially, the guidance states: “The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception.”
In practice, this meant that perfectly lawful speech could still end up logged in police databases – potentially visible in enhanced criminal-record checks. Over the ten years since the guidance was introduced, the FSU estimates that more than 250,000 NCHIs have been recorded in England and Wales, amounting to an average of 68 per day.
The tide began to turn in 2021 when former police officer Harry Miller successfully challenged the system in court after being visited by Humberside Police over allegedly transphobic tweets. An officer reportedly told him to “check his thinking,” and an NCHI was recorded against his name.
Mr Miller’s legal battle resulted in a Court of Appeal ruling that the widespread recording of NCHIs was an unlawful interference with free speech and breached Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
One of the key criticisms of NCHIs is the lasting damage they can do. Lord Macdonald QC, former Director of Public Prosecutions, wrote in The Times: “NCHIs have consequences. They are not anonymised. They sit forever against the names of the alleged perpetrators without any real investigation or right of appeal… We need hardly imagine what an HR manager would make of a job applicant with a police history of hate.”
Following Mr Miller’s win, then Home Secretary Suella Braverman introduced a statutory Code of Practice in March 2024 aimed at reining in police use of NCHIs. It urged forces to use common sense and respect the right to free expression, even when speech might be “potentially offensive”.
But a damning report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in September 2024 found that police forces were largely ignoring the new rules, continuing to record NCHIs much as before.
Labour, meanwhile, appears to favour tightening restrictions. Before becoming Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper proposed reversing the presumption that police should only record personal data on individuals if there’s a real risk of harm or future crime – particularly in cases involving anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
Mr Philp, however, insists this approach is misguided. “Police investigated and recorded personal data on around 13,000 NCHIs last year – taking up around 30,000 hours of police time… It is clear the police are now wasting colossal amounts of their time on NCHIs and infringing our ancient rights to free speech while they do so,” he wrote.
One argument often made in defence of NCHIs is that they help police understand community tensions and deploy resources accordingly. But according to The Telegraph, most forces do not even analyse the data they collect, rendering this rationale moot.
With public confidence in policing under strain and frontline officers stretched thin, the Conservatives now believe the time has come to scrap NCHIs altogether. “It’s clear that the Labour government has no real intention of fixing this problem,” Mr Philp concluded. “This is why the Conservatives are now announcing a new policy: NCHIs as a category of incident should be scrapped in their entirety.”
Read Chris Philp’s full article in The Telegraph here.
Main Image: Chris Philp hosts a roundtable. Picture by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
