Issue 430  27th December 2025

Police leaders are set to recommend scrapping non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) in a review to be published next month. College of Policing chair Lord Herbert told the BBC a "sensible" new approach, focused only on the most serious incidents, would "re-balance the system" for the social media age. NCHIs are alleged acts motivated by hostility or prejudice towards people with certain characteristics, such as race or gender, but which do not meet the bar for a criminal offence. Current Home Office guidance says they are recorded to collect data on "hate incidents that could escalate into more serious harm", but critics say they divert police resources and restrict freedom of speech. Though they are not crimes, NCHIs stay on police records and can come up in background checks.

Police guidance on the recording of NCHIs was first published in 2005, following recommendations by an inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence - the London teenager who was stabbed to death in a racist attack in 1993. But Lord Herbert said "an explosion of social media" in the years since they were introduced has meant police had been drawn into monitoring "mere disputes" online. Officers do not want to be "policing tweets", he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. He added that recent headlines about NCHIs were "awkward and very damaging" for the police. "It was quite clear that the whole regime needed looking at, that there was a perception that the police were being drawn into matters that they shouldn't have been," he added. The home secretary will have the final decision on whether to adopt the recommendations outlined by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs' Council in their review next month...

The former president of the supreme court Lady Hale is urging ministers to change the law so that children as young as 10 can no longer be charged as adults. Along with Lady Butler-Sloss, previously the highest-ranking female judge in England and Wales, she has signed an amendment to the crime and policing bill to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14.

The amendment emerged after charities said children’s brains were not fully developed by the age of 10, meaning they were unlikely to understand the impact of their actions or engage effectively with legal proceedings. The government has said it will oppose the amendment. England and Wales have the joint lowest age of criminal responsibility in Europe alongside Switzerland...

Children as young as 10 can be investigated by police, charged with a crime and put on trial, potentially leading to a lifelong criminal record. Most countries, including Spain, Germany and Italy, have set it at 14 or higher. In the year up to March 2024, about 3,400 children age 10 to 14 were cautioned or sentenced in England and Wales. The UN has previously urged England and Wales to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14. Countries criticised by ministers for having poor human rights records, such as Afghanistan, North Korea and Russia, have higher ages of criminal responsibility...

Magistrates are sitting in secret to allow utility companies to break into people’s homes, granting warrants based on applications they have never even seen, a London Standard investigation has found. Energy firms and the courts were rocked by scandal in late 2022 when it was revealed that hundreds of thousands of warrants – including for the homes of some of Britain’s poorest people – were being “waved through” by magistrates. The government promised a clean-up of the practices, including more help for vulnerable families, and a new court process was designed to deal with applications for warrants. But a year-long probe by The Standard has uncovered disturbing practices at courts across England and Wales, with magistrates now doing their work almost entirely in secret and handing out hundreds of warrants at a time without ever looking at the applications...

The Chief Magistrate has now launched an investigation after being presented with The Standard’s findings...