Public attitudes or moral perceptions on controversial or ethically sensitive legal areas

FOI reference: FOI-2025-2881

You asked

I would like to request the following:

1. Please provide any published or unpublished datasets from 1 January 2015 to 31\  December 2024 relating to public attitudes or moral perceptions on controversial or ethically sensitive legal areas, such as assisted dying, hate speech, drug policy, or obscenity.
2. Please provide any crime statistics from 2015 to 2024 showing trends in morally controversial offences (e.g. public order offences, hate crimes, indecency/obscenity charges), ideally broken down by year and offence category.
3. If available, please also provide any datasets or survey results which link public attitudes (e.g. from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, the British Social Attitudes Survey) to policy changes or legal developments over the same time period.

We said

Thank you for your request.

Unfortunately, we do not have any datasets that cover public attitudes to assisted dying, hate speech, drug policy, obscenity, policy changes or legal developments. 

We publish our Public opinions and social trends bulletin, however these focus on social insights on daily life and events, including experiences of the cost of living, as well as attitudes to important issues from the opinions and lifestyle survey (OPN). 

We publish various tables on perception and public confidence in the police and changing crime levels, these can be found in our annual supplementary tables.