Non-crime hate incidents are to be scrapped under plans that police chiefs will present to the Home Secretary next month.

Police leaders have decided that NCHIs are no longer “fit for purpose” after warnings that recording them undermines freedom of speech and diverts officers away from fighting crime.

Under the plans, NCHIs will be replaced with a new “common sense” system, where only a fraction of such incidents will be recorded under the most serious category of anti-social behaviour.

An NCHI falls short of being criminal but is perceived to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards a person with a particular characteristic. They stay on police records indefinitely and can come up in background checks.

The move to scrap them follows high-profile cases such as that of Graham Linehan, the Father Ted co-creator, whose arrest for a series of posts on X was criticised by Donald Trump’s administration as a “departure from democracy”.

Incidents will no longer be recorded on crime databases

The plans will be published next month by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and are expected to be backed by Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary.

Lord Herbert, the chairman of the College of Policing, told The Telegraph: “NCHIs will go as a concept. That system will be scrapped and replaced with a completely different system.

“There will be no recording of anything like it on crime databases. Instead, only the most serious category of what will be treated as anti-social behaviour will be recorded. It’s a sea change.”

Their exclusion from crime databases means any incidents will no longer have to be declared as part of checks in job applications.

Lord Herbert, a former Conservative policing minister, said controversial arrests or investigations such as those of Mr Linehan and Allison Pearson, a Telegraph columnist, would not occur under the new system.

Mr Linehan was arrested at Heathrow airport by five officers on suspicion of inciting violence with posts on X.

Pearson was questioned by police on her doorstep on Remembrance Sunday for allegedly inciting racial hatred in a tweet. Both cases were subsequently dropped, with no further action taken.

Lord Herbert said changes were necessary because the system, which dates back to 1999, was no longer “fit for purpose” because of the growth in social media and the advent of smartphones.

NCHIs were introduced following the Macpherson Inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder in order to monitor hate and hostility in communities.

“It’s drawn police into an area that I don’t believe they wanted to be in,” he said. “Police have been caricatured that they wanted to be involved in this, but I haven’t met a copper who does.”

Under the plans, police forces will be instructed not to log “hate” incidents on crime databases and instead treat them only as “intelligence” reports.

Officers get ‘common sense’ checklist

All officers will be issued with a “common sense” checklist to go through before they take any action, to prevent police from intervening in spats over tweets or offensive comments.

Lord Herbert said the checklist aimed to ensure officers’ approach was “sensible” and targeted serious anti-social behaviour that was causing genuine harm or risk within communities, such as anti-Semitism. He said some monitoring was needed “to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater”.

The changes reflect the concerns of Ms Mahmood, who told police chiefs last month that officers should be policing the streets, not “perfectly legal language in any individual’s tweets”.

The changes are also expected to be backed by Sir Mark Rowley, the current commissioner of the Met Police. He has ordered his officers to stop investigating NCHIs following their arrest of Mr Linehan. However, the force is still recording NCHIs.

Suella Braverman, a former Tory home secretary, tightened the rules to protect free speech in March 2023 so that NCHIs should only be recorded if they were “clearly motivated by intentional hostility” and where there was a real risk of escalation, “causing significant harm or a criminal offence”.

Since then, their use has fallen from 2,272 in the first quarter of 2022-23 to 1,649 in the three months to April this year, according to data from 33 police forces. There was, however, a spike in early 2024 amid a rise in anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim hate incidents after the October 7 terror attack on Israel in 2023.

However, trivial incidents were among the 13,200 NCHIs recorded during that period, including a nine-year-old who called a primary school classmate a “retard” and two secondary schoolgirls who said that another pupil smelt “like fish”.

Complaints about dodgy haircuts, soiled underpants and “transphobic” tweets about fish have all been recorded as NCHIs.

Under the proposed reforms, all forces will end the use of police crime systems for recording non-crime incidents such as anti-social behaviour or hate incidents. “Holding information about non-crime incidents on a crime system is not the right solution,” the plans said.

People ‘criminalised for non-crime matters’

A draft report proposing the abolition of NCHIs said the practice of recording them on crime systems had risked creating an “unintentional hierarchy of incidents in officers’ minds” and “a perception that policing is criminalising individuals for non-crime matters”.

Instead, it proposed that anti-social behaviour incidents would be recorded as intelligence. Police force call handlers – who answer 101 and 999 calls – and officers would be trained so that incidents reported to police were “not recorded if they are not appropriate for police to deal with”.

“Other agencies are often better placed to respond to some elements of hate and should play a more pivotal role in responding to it,” it said.

The new guidance, using the mnemonic PLANE, will require call handlers and officers to consider five principles before deciding whether to log an incident on intelligence databases: whether the response is Proportionate, whether the incident is Legal, and how Accountable, Necessary and Ethical any approach should be.

The plans come ahead of a planned attempt by peers to ban NCHIs in the new year. An amendment abolishing NCHIs is expected to be put to a vote in the Lords in February or March by Lord Hogan-Howe, a former Met Commissioner, and Lord Young, the founder of the Free Speech Union.

Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, has also called for the recording of NCHIs to be scrapped in all but a few cases.

Sir Keir Starmer has come under scrutiny over his Government’s stance on free speech, with JD Vance, the US vice-president, leading criticism that laws around online safety and abortion buffer zones were “eroding” freedom of expression in the UK.