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New laws to clamp down on racial and religious abuse of emergency workers, LBC learns
10 June 2025, 19:13
The government is to introduce extra measures to protect emergency workers from religious and racist abuse, LBC has learned.
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It comes after LBC revealed the true scale of the abuse faced by doctors, nurses, paramedics, teachers and police officers - with a frontline worker being assaulted every two minutes in Britain.
Whilst protection exists for police officers, ambulance workers and firefighters in public spaces, under current legislation that protection does not extend to people’s homes, leaving police powerless to charge those who racially abuse emergency workers attending home calls.
However, under a new amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill tabled today, this could result in two years’ imprisonment.
Originally, the law did not extend to people’s private properties as a way of ensuring that members of the public did not face prosecution for conversations held at home.
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Yet with LBC’s investigation raising serious questions about the safety of public sector workers from abuse, and frontline workers witnessing an escalation in racist and religiously-motivated abuse in people’s properties, the government has acted to ensure that protections will extend to paramedics, police officers and firefighters attending calls at people’s homes.
Reacting to LBC’s research, which showed over 225,000 frontline workers were physically assaulted in 2024 alone, Nicola Ranger, General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, told Shelagh Fogarty that their members were facing unprecedented levels of abuse:
"I recently spoke to a nurse [whose] colleague was racially abused on the ward and then the relatives then came back, five of them in balaclavas and baseball bats,” Ms Ranger said.
Attacked on the frontline every two minutes: LBC investigation uncovers shocking level of public sector assaults
“I have never, never ever in my entire career heard anything of that scale. I've worked with nurses who've had arms broken, I've spat at myself, been kicked... we're going to do a lot of listening to our nurses to really see how we stop this.”
In 2018, the Emergency Workers Assault Act was introduced following significant pressure from Nick Ferrari’s Guard Our Emergency Services campaign. The act made it a specific offence to attack an emergency worker, carrying a jail term of up to two years for offenders.
The amendment to the Police and Crime Bill therefore marks the latest move to provide additional protection to workers facing physical or verbal abuse at work.
Policing minister Dame Diana Johnson told LBC: “This government is rebuilding the bond between the public and the police, and part of that means ensuring our officers have the protections they deserve.
“By closing this loophole, we are going to be sending a really clear message that racial and religious abuse directed towards those who serve our communities will not be tolerated.”
