1 February 2026
The Home Secretary has said that she will scrap non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) in their current form because they have distracted the police from doing their day job of fighting crime.
Since the Free Speech Union was founded in 2020, it has been leading the charge calling for the abolition of NCHIs, which have had a chilling effect on free speech. In a recent article for the The Telegraph, Spiked’s Tom Slater described NCHIs as “among the most absurd and sinister innovations in modern British policing.
NCHIs fall short of meeting the threshold of a criminal offence but are recorded if an incident is perceived to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards an individual with a particular protected characteristic, such as sex, race, sexual orientation and disability.
Shabana Mahmood has said in an interview with The Telegraph that police officers should focus on “catching criminals, cutting crime, making sure that people in our neighbourhoods feel safe” rather than obsessively policing tweets.
Since the concept of NCHIs were introduced in 2014, it is estimated that police forces across England and Wales have spent at least 660,000 hours investigating and recording them rather than solving crime that causes real-life harm on our streets. This is particularly poignant when you consider that in 2023, figures reveal that 90 per cent of all crimes went unsolved.
The overzealous policing of hurty words and arbitrating petty disputes has inevitably undermined public confidence in policing. A nine-year-old child had an NCHI recorded against her name after words said in the school playground, and a man for whistling the theme to Bob the Builder and two secondary-school students had NCHIs logged against them for saying a fellow student smelt “like fish”.
NCHIs have been weaponised by militant activists to silence those they disagree with – such as in the example of Graham Linehan – who was arrested by five-armed guards police officers as he landed at Heathrow for three gender-critical posts on X.
While the Home Secretary’s comments are welcome, and no doubt a result of the sustained public pressure campaign the Free Speech Union has led, we cannot celebrate yet. The devil will be in the detail.
It was reported just before Christmas that police chiefs, including the College of Policing, were set to tell the Home Secretary that NCHIs are “not fit for purpose” and recommend that they be scrapped – something that the Free Speech Union has long argued.
In the pursuit of a return to ‘common sense’ policing, there are a number of things that the Home Secretary must commit to to address the injustice of NCHIs and their legacy.
The truly pernicious aspect of an NCHI is that they stay on your record for up to six years and can appear in enhanced DBS checks which can prevent you from getting a job. Yes, that's right, you can be rejected from a job for committing a non-crime. It is total madness.
There are 100,000 NCHIs that have been issued in the past six years that could still be sitting on people’s records. The scary thing is that you may not even know if you have an NCHI on your record as the police do not need to inform you if they have logged one against you.
General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Lord Young of Acton and former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Lord Hogan-Howe tabled an amendment to the government’s Crime and Policing Bill which would abolish NCHIs in their entirety, delete historic NCHIs from people’s records and ensure that no future non-criminal hate incidents are disclosable in employment background checks.
The Home Secretary has announced that the new framework will be announced upon the completion of Lord MacDonald’s review of public order and hate crime – which the Free Speech Union has contributed to.
While this is undeniably a step in the right direction, the Free Speech Union will keep the champagne on ice until more detail is set out.
If we are to finally – once and for all - consign NCHIs to the dustbin of history, it is important we do it properly.
Read more in The Telegraph.
