Britain’s Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes Are Rising. Its Mosques Are Facing a New Threat.
By Shizza Umer
Britain has committed up to £40 million to protect mosques, Muslim schools and community centres in 2026-27. The harder question is how long a mosque has to wait before any of it arrives.
510 applications, 199 answers
Between 1 July 2024 and 3 November 2025, 510 mosques applied to the Protective Security for Mosques Scheme. 199 were successful and 311 were still pending. Not one application was formally rejected in that period. The Home Office did not say no. It did not say anything.
Those figures only exist in public because of a nine-month transparency battle. The department refused to release them, citing national security, community tensions and the risk of targeted attacks. The Information Commissioner’s Office ruled in July that it was “not persuaded that withholding the requested information is reasonably necessary to prevent a risk to national security.”
Some mosques report waiting up to two years. The Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Newham applied in August 2024 after a hate crime and had a site visit a month later. A trustee says the mosque has chased repeatedly and that no Home Office contact point exists for updates. In a parliamentary answer, the government said applications are individually assessed and approved sites referred to delivery partners for surveys and installation. A spokesperson said the department is working to process all applications as quickly as possible.
The official figures
Police recorded 5,132 religious hate crimes targeting Muslims in England and Wales in the year ending March 2026, up 15% from 4,479. It was the largest increase of any hate crime category, against a 7% rise across all 146,825 recorded offences.
The Metropolitan Police is excluded from longer-term trend analysis because it changed recording systems in February 2024, and the old system overstated hate crime by applying a single flag to every offence in a report. On that conservative basis, Muslim religious hate crimes reached 3,660, their highest annual level since the year ending March 2018.
What the monitoring found
The British Muslim Trust documented 78 incidents involving 64 mosque-related premises between July 2025 and July 2026. Almost a fifth of those premises were targeted more than once, and one Birmingham mosque three times in twelve months.
The trust’s severity scale is where its findings bite. Incidents in its upper four levels rose from 22.2% of cases between July and October 2025 to 62.7% from November onward. Lower-level incidents fell. Arson, weapons, threats to kill and violence rose. Chief executive Akeela Ahmed put it plainly: “Today, a mosque is vulnerable purely because it’s a mosque.”
Why the incident count is disputed
Writing in The Spectator, Andrew Gilligan argues the figures do not hold. He says the report itemises roughly 40 incidents rather than 78, and that about a third of those are not attacks, not aimed at mosques, or neither. He objects to counting foiled plots, protests, letters and online abuse alongside arson.
The objection has force. A threat, a suspected plot and a completed assault are not the same event, and a report that blurs them invites exactly this response. What the dispute does not touch is the Home Office record, the ICO ruling, or the men charged at Peacehaven with arson with intent to endanger life, whose trial is provisionally listed for 1 December 2026.
The part nobody is arguing about
Seventeen per cent of Britons strongly agree that the growth in the Muslim population poses a foundational threat to UK culture. Fifty-six per cent of British Muslims experienced prejudice in the past year. Among Muslim women, 69% say they feel less safe since the Unite the Kingdom protests.
Britain has decided its mosques need protecting. It has not yet decided to deliver it before the next door is set alight.
By Shizza Umer
Sources
Home Office hate crime statistics · Home Office funding announcement · Hyphen · UK Parliament · The National · The National, funding delays · Middle East Eye · Arab News · British Future · ITV News · Suffolk News · The Spectator
Hashtags
#Verum #Islamophobia #AntiMuslimHate #UKNews #MosqueSafety #HateCrime #BritishMuslims #ReligiousFreedom #HumanRights #UnitedKingdom
