The Crime and Policing Bill returned to the House of Lords on 16 April. After ping-pong with the Commons, peers conceded ground on something that should never have existed in the first place: the abolition of non-crime hate incidents. After more than a decade of officers diligently filing reports on schoolchildren, pensioners and journalists for the crime of having opinions, common sense has finally been written into statute.
It should not have taken Parliament this long to grasp that the police's job is to fight crime, not to umpire conversation.
What Were Non-Crime Hate Incidents?
For the uninitiated, a "non-crime hate incident" was exactly what it sounds like. Something that was not a crime, but which someone — anyone — perceived as motivated by hostility. No threshold. No proof. No actual offence committed. The complainant did not even need to be the supposed target. Once recorded, your name sat on a police database and could turn up on enhanced criminal record checks for jobs in teaching, healthcare and care work.
People lost livelihoods over this. The journalist Allison Pearson received a knock at her door from Essex Police in 2024 over a tweet. A nine-year-old was investigated for calling another child "a retard." A grandmother was logged for misgendering. This was not policing. It was a state-funded grievance bureau, and it had no business existing in a free country.
The Slow Death of a Bad Idea
The College of Policing introduced the guidance in 2014. By 2023, more than 250,000 incidents had been recorded. The Court of Appeal found, in the case of Harry Miller, that the practice had a "chilling effect" on free expression. The Conservative government promised to scale it back. They didn't. Labour, predictably, sat on their hands until the Lords forced their arm. Now, at long last, the formal abolition is here.
Let's be clear who deserves credit. Reform UK MPs and peers — alongside Conservative backbenchers and a handful of brave Labour figures — kept hammering this issue. The campaign group Free Speech Union deserves a particular mention. Without sustained pressure, this would never have happened. Governments do not give back power they have taken from their citizens unless forced to.
Why It Mattered
This was never about the right to be unkind. It was about the principle that police time should be spent on burglaries, assaults and shoplifting — not on patrolling Twitter for the wrong tone. While neighbourhood policing collapsed and rural crime soared, officers in some forces were spending entire shifts logging "incidents" that no court would ever hear. Resources matter. Priorities matter. Letting the state classify legal speech as "hate" was a category error of the first order.
It also mattered because of the chilling effect. People stopped speaking their minds at parish council meetings. Teachers became wary of debating controversial topics. Pub conversations got quieter. A free society does not need everyone to say the same thing. It needs everyone to feel that they can say something without an officer turning up at the door three days later.
The Work Isn't Done
Abolishing the formal NCHI database is a victory, but the cultural rot it represents is not gone. Plenty of police forces will quietly continue to record "intelligence" under different headings. Local councils still run hate-speech complaint portals. Universities still have speech codes that go further than statute. We have won a battle, not the war.
The next fight is to ensure the Crime and Policing Bill's other provisions — particularly around protest powers and AI-related offences — do not become a back door to the same nonsense under a new name. Reform UK will be watching. Closely.
A Win for Britain
For now, raise a glass. A bad law is gone. A police database that should never have existed is being unwound. And the people who said for years that this whole thing was an absurd assault on free speech turned out to be right all along. Common sense, when you keep arguing for it, eventually wins. Even in Westminster.