More than two-thirds of Luton residents surveyed say they experienced or witnessed anti-Muslim hate in the past six months, according to a new Islamophobia report. Half of Muslim respondents said they now feel less safe or less welcome in the town than they did six months ago.
The report, published on 20 July by FACES Luton, a Muslim-Christian community partnership, together with the Raise Up Foundation and the Courtney Foundation, surveyed 209 Muslim and non-Muslim residents. Its findings were reported by LutonToday on 22 July under the headline residents themselves supplied: “Everybody knows, but nobody does anything.”
What the Islamophobia Luton report found
The testimony behind the statistics is specific. One Muslim convert working in social care told researchers she began facing “subtle exclusion to assumptions and comments” from colleagues after she started wearing hijab. Other respondents described being sworn at and hearing racist remarks in public spaces, including supermarkets. In Luton North, the report found, a large number of complaints came from women, hijabs pulled off in the street, online abuse, exclusion at work.
Some respondents also pointed to what they called a double standard in how the town enforces order on its streets: Palestine flags were repeatedly taken down, they said, while far-right flags, including one left outside a mosque, went undisturbed. This is testimony from individual respondents rather than a documented record of council or police decisions, and it should be read as such, but it is the sharpest evidence in the report of a pattern residents believe is structural rather than accidental.
A pattern seventeen years in the making
None of this is new to Luton. The English Defence League formed in the town in 2009 in explicit opposition to what it called “radical Islam”, staging rallies aimed at Luton Central Mosque and the Bury Park area, which it branded an “Islamic ghetto”. An Islamic centre in the town was firebombed that same year. Britain First ran leafleting operations targeting Muslim residents in 2016, and Luton’s mosques have repeatedly had to issue safeguarding statements in response to nationally organised anti-Muslim threats, including the 2018 “Punish a Muslim Day” letters.
The most recent escalation followed the July 2024 murders of three children in Southport, which was followed by anti-Muslim rioting across England. Luton’s mosques met Bedfordshire Police and issued a community statement that August. A further Britain First-linked mobilisation in the town in September 2025 prompted another response from the Luton Council of Mosques. The new report lands, in other words, inside a continuous seventeen-year record of far-right attention on Luton, not as an isolated local complaint appearing out of nowhere.
The national picture
Luton’s findings sit inside a wider national trend. Home Office figures for the year ending March 2025 recorded 7,164 religiously motivated hate crimes in England and Wales, the highest total since records began, with Muslims the largest single target: 4,478 recorded incidents, ahead of the 2,873 recorded against Jewish people. The rise has been linked directly to the aftermath of the Southport murders and the unrest that followed.
A national Muslim Census study published in February 2026, surveying 4,800 respondents, found that only 51.9% of British Muslims feel they strongly belong in the UK, down from 93% in a 2016 Ipsos MORI survey. Set against that decline, Luton’s local report reads less like a single town’s grievance and more like a local measurement of a national collapse in Muslims’ sense of safety and belonging.
Officials say they are already acting
Luton Borough Council said it was “pleased that the report recognises the progress already being made”, pointing to work it said it was delivering with partners including Bedfordshire Police, among them security guidance for mosques and weekly partnership visits. A council spokesperson said: “Everyone in Luton deserves to feel safe, supported and that they belong in our town.”
Bedfordshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, John Tizard, told LutonToday the report “demonstrates the corrosive impact of Islamophobia in Luton and how it is affecting communities across the town”, and said he would “do whatever I can to oppose Islamophobia, and all other forms of racial and faith-based hatred.” The council also pointed to an Islamophobia working group bringing together Luton’s mosques, Bedfordshire Police and the council, which it said has been running for some time, with police training and reporting mechanisms among its stated outputs.
Tony Thompson, co-chair of FACES Luton, set the institutions’ account against residents’ own testimony directly: Islamophobia, he said, is “not a Muslim problem… it is a problem about the kind of town we are willing to be.” The report’s recommendations remain, as yet, unmet: anti-racism education embedded in the school curriculum, clear bullying-reporting procedures for pupils, an independent audit of how Islamophobic incidents are actually investigated, and a review of Muslim patients’ experience of healthcare in the town.
Luton’s Muslim residents have described, in their own words, what happens when nobody does anything. Whether the borough’s institutions now do something is the test the report itself has set them.
