Final reminder for this.
To clarify, the remit of this survey is around the reporting and recording of hate crimes and incidents. So if you have one or more of the 5 characteristics used to assess hate crimes, they might ask you if you ever reported an incident, how was the process, what could be better. They say hate crimes are usually under reported so they want to know what might encourage people to come forward.
Issues to do with actual legislation like expanding the list of characteristics etc is outwith the scope of the survey as that is currently going through parliament.
They also ask if there should be changes to the structure of Hate Crime reporting. I think this has been prompted by Harry Miller's case. So I spent quite a lot of time on this question - about the fact that what constitutes a hate crime or incident is solely down to the person's subjective feeling of offense and upset, and there is no requirement to provide evidence that there was actual hatred or malice, plus these incidents get logged on a person's name and could potentially be flagged up on a background check. It leaves the process open to misuse by malicious individuals and can artificially inflate statistics which is not what we want.
I don't know how much of the current system can be changed as it was based on the McPherson report, but it's worth highlighting anyway.