The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) prosecuted 566 cases of religious hate crime in England and Wales in 2010-11 (roughly three times the figure for 2007-08) and secured convictions in 472 or 83% of them.
The success rate was proportionately similar to 2009-10 but represented a 94% increase in convictions. The number of guilty pleas entered was 7% up, having fallen since 2007-08.
Nevertheless, religious hate crimes still accounted for only 4% of all hate crimes prosecuted in 2010-11.
The number of religiously-motivated crimes referred to the CPS by the police also grew between 2009-10 and 2010-11, by 45%.
These findings are extracted from Hate Crime and Crimes against Older People Report, 2010-2011, released by the CPS last month and available at:
http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/docs/cps_hate_crime_report_2011.pdf
This is the first time that the CPS has separately published data on religiously aggravated crime, although most of the key disaggregations (both in the report and in accompanying worksheets on the CPS website) are still recorded for racial and religious hate crime combined, which will be too broad a category for many BRIN users.
It will be appreciated that the upward trend in prosecutions and convictions for religious hate crimes since 2007-08 does not necessarily mean that there are actually more offences of this sort being committed. Almost certainly, it mainly reflects a greater preparedness of victims to report such crimes and of the police and CPS to identify a religious (as opposed to another) motivation.
