Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate he has made of the number of arrests for online harassment in the last 12 months.

The Home Office collects and publishes data on arrests as part of the annual ‘Police Powers and Procedures’ statistical bulletin. The most recent data up to the year ending March 2023 is available here: Police powers and procedures England and Wales statistics - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

However, the data is collected by broader offence group e.g. “violence against the person”, therefore data on more specific offences such as online harassment is not available.

The number of harassment and stalking offences reported to police which were flagged as online crime is available in table F11 of the ‘Crime in England and Wales: Other related tables’ dataset:

Crime in England and Wales: Other related tables - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)