Wrexham Hate Crime Figures To Be Reviewed By Committee

16 incidents of hate crime have been reported to Wrexham Council in the last 12 months, new figures have revealed.

In a report due to go before the Customers, Performance and Resources Scrutiny Committee on Wednesday, the progress of the Council’s ‘Strategic Equality Plan (SEP) 2012-16’ will be presented to councillors.

The quite detailed report notes that The Council has a legal duty to publish a Strategic Equality Plan (SEP), an action plan and progress reports, in order to comply with the Equality Act 2010 and the Equality Act 2010 (Statutory Duties) (Wales) Regulations 2011.

The details of incidents reported in the past 12 months can be found in the ‘Strategic Equality Plan Annual Report’ on page 63.

Under ‘Progress against the general duty under the Equality Act 2010’ the report goes onto note ‘a range of activities taken forward in relation to general duties’ in the last 12 months.

Of the 16 hate crimes that were reported to the Council during the last 12 months, 14 of the incidents were racially motivated and two related to sexual orientation.

Along with this, Street Scene rapidly removed eight instances of racially motivated graffiti the same day it was reported.

The report goes onto note that ‘Training on hate crime was provided to Youth Workers, Housing Department staff, AVOW, CAB, Coleg Cambria, Wrexham Muslim Association, Glyndwr University student support team’ and that there are now 30 Third Party Reporting Centres across the County Borough.

Within the report is states: “We feel we have made good progress against each of the equality objectives. The table below gives some examples of how we have achieved this. However, we recognise that this self assessment is limited because it does not include a robust assessment by Wrexham people.

“We will address this during 2014-15 by improving our community engagement on equality issues including holding a public event. We will also focus on developing measurable equality outcomes that can be included in future reports.”

Within the report details of the ‘Council Plan Priority Outcomes’ are listed, including the economy, people, place and organisation.

The report will be presented before the Committee on Wednesday July 23rd at 2pm.