Home Office figures show rise in recorded hate crimes targeting Muslims and Jewish people

The Home Office published figures on 8 October 2026 showing a rise in police-recorded hate crimes in England and Wales in the year to March. Police recorded 146,825 offences, up 7% on the previous year, according to the Guardian’s account of the release. Recorded offences targeting Muslims rose to 5,132, while those targeting Jewish people rose to 3,162. Those annual figures include Metropolitan Police data; longer-term comparisons in the bulletin exclude the force because of a change in its recording system.

The release covers offences recorded from April 2025 to March 2026. The Guardian reported that offences targeting Muslims rose 15%, from 4,479 to 5,132, and antisemitic hate crimes rose 10%, from 2,874 to 3,162. The increases describe offences entered in police records. They do not, on their own, establish how many incidents went unreported or why the recorded numbers changed.

How the Metropolitan Police affects the comparisons

The distinction between the annual totals and the historical comparisons matters because they cover different sets of police forces. The all-force figures include the Metropolitan Police. For longer-term comparisons, the Home Office excludes its data following a change in the force’s crime-recording system. Figures presented on that excluding-Met basis should therefore be read alongside, rather than treated as parts of, the all-force totals.

On the excluding-Met basis, police recorded 8,214 religious hate-crime offences, the highest annual total since those records began in 2012, according to the Guardian’s account of the Home Office data. The same account gives 2,003 offences targeting Jewish people outside the Metropolitan Police area. That was the second-highest annual figure on that basis, below the 2,093 recorded in the year ending March 2024.

What the British Muslim Trust recorded at mosques

Separately, the British Muslim Trust said it had recorded 78 incidents involving 64 mosques across the UK and Channel Islands between 21 July 2025 and 30 July 2026, according to the Guardian. That is roughly one incident every five days. The Trust’s monitoring covers incidents at mosques and a different geographical area from the Home Office’s England and Wales police statistics. Its count should not be added to, or directly compared with, the police-recorded offence totals.

In its report A Year of Division, the Trust characterised the incidents as showing a shift from hostility aimed at mosque buildings toward Muslims inside them. Using its own seven-level severity scale, it placed 62.7% of incidents from November 2025 in the upper four levels. The corresponding share from July to October 2025 was 22.2%, the Guardian reported. Those percentages describe the incidents the Trust monitored and how it classified them; they are not a police measure of the severity of all anti-Muslim hate crimes.

The Guardian reported that anti-Muslim offences rose sharply in September 2025, coinciding with protests and public disorder, and again in March 2026 after the outbreak of war between the US and Iran. Those timings provide context for the recorded pattern but do not, by themselves, show what caused either increase. The Trust urged political figures and commentators to take care when discussing immigration and integration, saying such discussion could become difficult to distinguish from hostility toward British Muslim communities.

Community responses to the recorded increases

Akeela Ahmed, the British Muslim Trust’s chief executive, told the Guardian that security needs were increasing and that many Muslims were afraid in everyday life. She called for action on the causes of hate. Ammer Amin, a trustee of the planned Masjid Al-Ummah mosque in Watford, described the effect of repeated incidents at its site and said he believed political rhetoric had emboldened hostility. His assessment is an attributed view; the available figures do not establish a causal link.

The Guardian reported that the Watford mosque plans include a sports hall, gym, nursery and food bank intended for the wider community. Crucifixes were sprayed on the site’s hoardings in October 2025, it said, and model pigs were thrown onto the premises in February 2026. The incidents show the local experience behind the Trust’s concerns, while the Trust’s broader monitoring and the police figures remain separate sources of evidence with different methods and coverage.

The Community Security Trust described antisemitic hate crime as remaining at an unacceptably high level, according to the Guardian. The Home Office’s new annual totals show increases in offences recorded as targeting both Muslim and Jewish people. Its longer-term religious and Jewish-targeted comparisons exclude Metropolitan Police data, while the headline annual totals include it. Together, the sources establish the rise in recorded offences and the concerns voiced by community groups, but they do not establish the full prevalence of hate incidents.