Home Office confirms 40% of religious hate crimes in London targeted Jews

Britain’s biggest police force, the Metropolitan Police, has recorded 40% of religious hate crimes as being targeted at Jewish people over the past year, it has emerged.

The Home Office confirmed the steep rise in antisemitic hate incidents in London as it published figures for religious hate crimes across England and Wales which excluded the Met, because of a change in their recording system.

The Home Office cautioned that because of a change in the crime recording system used by the Metropolitan Police – Britain’s biggest police force – figures are not directly comparable and it had therefore excluded this force’s data when looking at year-on-year trends.

Get The Jewish News Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

Away from the capital, new figures showed religious hate crimes targeted at Muslims rose by 19%, with a spike following the Southport murders and riots that followed last summer, the Home Office said.

Meanwhile, outside London, religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people and recorded by the other forces in England and Wales fell by 18%, from 2,093 to 1,715.

In total, excluding the Met, there were 115,990 hate crime offences recorded by police in the year ending March 2025, up 2% from 113,166 for the previous 12 months.

This was the highest annual total of these offences recorded, the Home Office said.

Separate and more recent figures – recorded by community organisations rather than police – have showed continued high levels of religious hate incidents.

The Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors antisemitism in the UK, recorded 1,521 antisemitic incidents across the UK in the first half of 2025.

This was the second highest total ever reported to the organisation in the first six months of any year, but it was down by a quarter from the record high of 2,019 incidents recorded between January and June 2024.

Reports to the CST of antisemitism reached a record high in 2023 at 4,296 – the year that saw the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel and the subsequent military action in the region that has continued since.

Meanwhile, anti-Muslim hate monitoring organisation Tell Mama said it received a total of 913 reports between June and September this year, with references made to 17 mosques and Islamic institutions being targeted within that period.

The organisation said that in the seven days following Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally – which saw more than 100,000 people turn out in central London as well as around 5,000 anti-racism demonstrators on September 13 – it received reports of 157 anti-Muslim hate.

Meanwhile, according to the Home Office figures, published on Thursday, race hate crimes rose by 6% from 77,901 in the year to March 2024 to 82,490 in the year to this March..

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said Jewish and Muslim communities “continue to experience unacceptable levels of often violent hate crime”.