INCIDENTS of racism are down to their lowest for twelve years, according to a report to be presented to Glasgow City Council.

The statistics offered by the Scottish Government show that reported incidents of race crime last year show a decrease by 11% to its lowest level since 2004.

However, the chairwoman of Glasgow’s Hate Crime Working Group, Bailie Fariha Thomas, thinks that the next batch of results will show conditions worsening again.

Bailie Thomas said: “I think they’re definitely going up again, we’ll see that when the next report comes out.

“We’ve not had the spike in Scotland post-Brexit that they had down south but there is a feeling in communities that there has been an increase.

This comes as the council heads into the final year of its four year equality plan which aims to significantly improve conditions for protected groups in the city.

With help from Community Safety Glasgow the council are improving the ways in which hate crime can be reported by creating 19 new centres for this over the last three years.

As well as this, 2016 saw Community Safety Glasgow coordinating a number of campaigns across the city, including a week of events to raise awareness of the issue.

While the state of racially aggravated crime in the city is slowly improving, other kinds of hate crime are not seeing such promising results.

Religiously-aggravated incidents only decreased by 1% last year while charges against the transgender community are now at their highest since reporting began.

As well as this, hate crime attributed to sexual orientation is up by more than 15% since 2014.

The biggest concerns for hate crime in the city, however, are hate crimes against the disabled community.

While the number of crimes in this area increasing by more than 40% is a worrying statistics itself, experts have expressed worries that this form of prejudice continues to be under-reported.