POLICE data shows an increase in reported hate crimes in Dorset last year.

Provided via the Home Office, the figures show that between April 2017 and March 2018 there were 564 incidents reported to Dorset Police, up from 443 the year before.

The vast majority, 418, were reportedly racist in nature, and 23 based on religion.

Nationally, the number of referrals of reported hate crimes to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) fell over the previous three years, as did the number of prosecutions. The latest data is not yet available.

According to the law, hate crime is defined as “any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic”.

These characteristics include ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability and transgender identity as well as “religion or beliefs”.

If the 564 reported incidents in Dorset each had different perpetrators, they would account for 0.07 per cent of the county’s population, based on 2017 figures.

The CPS has been pushing to increase ‘sentence uplifts’, where sentences for convicted crimes are increased because the defendant is judged to have been motivated by prejudice. These increased from 4,347 cases in 2015/16 to 6,306 in 2016/17.

Last year the director of public prosecutions Alison Saunders said: “Sentence uplift is important. It demonstrates that the hate crime has been recognised and the perpetrator has received a more severe sentence, reflecting that they had targeted someone because of their disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.

“The significant increase in the proportion of sentence uplifts not only reflects the hard work of the CPS to present these cases at court, but also our work in collaboration with the police, our partners in the wider criminal justice system and our valued community partners.”

Nationally, there were 80,393 hate crime offences recorded by the police in 2016/17, an increase of 29 per cent on the previous year.

The CPS says changes in police data reporting practice are partially responsible for the increase.

The number of reportedly racially and religiously aggravated hate crimes referred to the CPS by police forces dropped to 10,706 in 2016/17, after a three year decline.

The number of referrals for homophobic, biphobic and transphobic hate crime rose by 53 to 1,392. The number of reportedly transphobic offences recorded decreased from 98 to 87.

There was an increase in referrals of disability hate crimes, from 930 to 988.

The government has tasked the Law Commission with exploring whether there should be additional “protected characteristics”, to include women, men and the elderly.