Police forces and courts are collecting less data on the ethnicity of criminals than at any time in the past 15 years amid fears of being called racist, figures have shown.
Senior Tory MPs claimed the growing failure to collect the data amounted to an institutional “cover-up” by the state of “the costs of migration”.
Government figures provided under Freedom of Information laws showed that the proportion of offences, including child sexual abuse, where no data on the ethnicity of convicted criminals being recorded had trebled in the past 15 years.
Ministry of Justice data showed that the proportion of those convicted of child sex offences where ethnicity was not recorded increased from 11.6 per cent in 2010 to 28.7 per cent last year. For all sexual offences, it rose from 15 per cent to 29 per cent.
This is despite evidence in the early 2000s that police and local authorities covered up grooming scandals, which often involved Pakistani gangs, for fear of being accused of racism. The data showed that ethnicity was not just omitted for sexual crimes but across all offence types.
Neil O’Brien, a former minister who uncovered the information gaps, said he was alarmed that such “data deserts” were growing at a time when there was increasing focus on criminals’ ethnicity following the grooming scandals.
“You might have thought that following 2020 and the huge public discussion surrounding the death of George Floyd there would be improvements to statistics on criminal justice and ethnicity,” he said, referring to the murder by a white police officer that triggered the Black Lives Matter movement.
“But the reverse is true – we are becoming less and less likely to record the ethnicity of people convicted of crimes. More and more offences see the ethnicity of those convicted recorded as ‘unknown’.”
Mr O’Brien said there was no other explanation than cultural sensitivities of police and other agencies, adding: “It has to be wariness on the part of the authorities about recording and fear of being called racist.
“We don’t see a big rise in refusal to declare in other services, and the rise across the country is completely inconsistent.”
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “To command the confidence of the British public, the criminal justice system must be open and transparent.
“The reduction in published data on the ethnicity of convicted criminals, in sharp contrast to data on age or sex, will only fuel perceptions that the British state is covering up the costs of migration.
“We urgently need all the data so that, for the first time, we can see the actual impact of different types of migration.”
Mr Jenrick called for the Government to present a report to Parliament each year detailing the nationality, visa and asylum status of every offender convicted in the English and Welsh courts.
While the focus in the last month has been on child sex abuse after Elon Musk, the the US tech billionaire, reignited fury over the scandal, the figures provided under Freedom of Information laws show that the growing failure to collect data on the ethnic origin of offenders extends across all crime types and offences.
In 2010, ethnic data on criminals convicted of robbery was only absent in 14 per cent of cases. By 2024, that had jumped to 44 per cent. This was similar for offences of violence against the person, where the failure to record ethnicity increased from 11 per cent to 30 per cent.
Drug offences showed one of the biggest increases. Police failed to record the ethnic data in only eight per cent of those crimes in 2010 but by 2024, it had risen to 39 per cent – a five-fold increase. For possession of weapons, the data gap jumped from eight per cent to 31 per cent.
For shoplifting, the figure rose from seven per cent 15 years ago to 30.2 per cent last year, while for common assault and battery it increased from 7.8 per cent in 2010 to 28.6 per cent last year. The data gap for driving a motor vehicle under the influence of drugs and drink increased from 4.8 per cent to 17.5 per cent.
The same trend was also evident for the most serious indictable offences, including murder, rape and assault causing grievous bodily harm, where the proportion of convictions where the ethnicity of the perpetrator was recorded as “unknown” rose from 11.8 per cent in 2010 to 34.4 per cent in 2024.
Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, has ordered police to plug gaps in the ethnicity data they collect on child sexual exploitation, saying it was “still inadequate” for both perpetrators and victims.
She has told the police’s child sexual exploitation taskforce that it must expand its collection of data to cover not only at the beginning of an investigation when suspects may not have yet been identified, but also at the end of an inquiry when there was a fuller picture of perpetrators and victims.
Last week, the taskforce published data showing that Pakistanis were up to four times more likely to be responsible for child sex grooming offences reported to police than the general population.
However, it was only based on initial data from some 30 per cent of grooming cases in 2023 and the first nine months of 2024 where perpetrators had been interviewed and had given their ethnicity.
On Friday, Richard Fewkes, the director of the child sexual exploitation taskforce, denied that gaps in ethnicity data collected by police were down to officers making conscious omissions “out of cultural sensitivity”.
He said Ms Cooper had “quite rightly” raised concerns about gaps in police data, but added: “What it isn’t is police officers making a conscious decision not to record ethnicity out of cultural sensitivity – it definitely is not that.”
It was put to Mr Fewkes that journalists had been told to drop stories on child sexual exploitation and grooming gangs that were “bad for community relations” and that police were “part of the problem, not the solution”.
He responded: “That’s not the case, and I’ll challenge that… that’s certainly not something that’s come from the taskforce. It is, in the main, caused by the point in time that we collect the data, and that is at the start of an investigation – so we haven’t got the opportunity necessarily to have that interaction with a suspect that allows us to record [such information].”
Earlier this week, Ms Cooper announced the Government would back five local inquiries into grooming gangs, the first of which will be in Oldham – where Labour’s initial refusal to back an inquiry triggered public attacks from Mr Musk, a key ally of Donald Trump.