Police in England and Wales recorded 7,164 religiously motivated hate crimes last year, according to an annual report released on Oct. 9 by the Home Office, the U.K. government’s interior ministry—one week after a domestic terror attack on Yom Kippur at a synagogue in Manchester, England.
This year’s report, which covers police-recorded hate-crime offenses from March 2024 to March 2025, reflected a 3% increase in hate crimes based on religious bias—the highest annual total of such offenses on record, the Home Office stated.
While religious hate crimes targeting Muslims saw a 19% increase year-over-year (from 2,690 to 3,199 incidents), the report found that hate crimes targeting Jews fell 18% (from 2,093 to 1,715 incidents)
“Caution is needed with these figures as they exclude the Metropolitan Police Service, which recorded 40% of all religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people in the last year,” the Home Office stated.
“This fall follows a 113% increase in these offenses in the year ending March 2024 (which included MPS data), with a spike in these offenses after the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict,” it added.
Andrew Gilbert, vice president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said the “figures released just show what every British Jew already knows.”
“Antisemitic hate crimes in the U.K. remain at a historic high following Hamas’s terrorist onslaught on Oct. 7, 2023,” he said. “Nobody who saw the deeply offensive and insensitive protests on the second anniversary of the massacre could doubt it.”
He added that “following the murderous terror attack in Manchester, it is now clearer than ever that the government must act to ensure the law is enforced on antisemitic hate speech, that legislation is strengthened where necessary and that antisemitism is tackled in wider society.”
