Police forces are failing to record the ethnicity of criminals in case they are accused of racism, it was claimed last night.
Analysis of government figures shows a sharp increase in the percentage of offences such as child abuse where the ethnicity of the perpetrator is not recorded.
More than one in four (28.7 per cent) child sex offence cases do not record the ethnicity of the perpetrator, according to latest Ministry of Justice data, compared with around one in 20 (5.6 per cent) in 2011.
For sexual offences generally, a similar percentage currently go without the offender’s ethnicity being recorded – 29 per cent, up from 8 per cent in 2011.
And the ethnicity of the criminal in almost half of all robberies (44 per cent) now goes unreported, up hugely from just 8 per cent in 2011.
Former Conservative minister Neil O’Brien, who carried out the analysis, said the statistics demonstrated an increasing ‘digital desert on migration’.
He said this was particularly concerning given the scandal of the grooming gangs, where men of largely Pakistani heritage were convicted of raping, abusing and trafficking young girls in towns across the UK.
He told The Mail on Sunday: ‘It is alarming given the grooming gangs scandal that there seems to be no consistency whatsoever in the recording of the ethnicity of offenders.
‘That means that there is no way that people in the criminal justice system can be joining up the dots to see if they have a problem that is specific to a particular group.’
Mr O’Brien is concerned authorities are not recording ethnicity due to a ‘fear of being called racist’.
He added: ‘We know a lack of willingness to think about the connections between incidents was part of the problem, and the reason the victims of the grooming gang scandal were let down so badly. But it seems like we are still not joining the dots.
‘That is exactly why we need a full national inquiry and why the Government is wrong to be blocking it.’
Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick told The Daily Telegraph that the reduction in data on the ethnicity of convicted criminals ‘will only fuel perceptions that the British state is covering up the costs of migration’.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper this week announced a series of local reviews into grooming gangs after tech tycoon Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, started commenting on the scandal. Ms Cooper also ordered a three-month rapid review of the ‘current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation’ after several Labour MPs began calling for a fresh investigation into what happened.