Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people have been (a) charged and (b) prosecuted with communications offences under the Online Safety Act 2023 by offence.

The Online Safety Act introduced a number of communication offences, which were commenced in January 2024. These offences were introduced to criminalise cyberflashing, fake news intended to cause non-trivial harm and other online abuse.

The Ministry of Justice publishes data on offenders prosecuted with communications offences under the Online Safety Act 2023. This is available in the Outcomes by Offences data tool, that can be downloaded from the Criminal Justice Statistics landing page here: Criminal Justice Statistics.

The number of prosecutions for communications offences can be accessed by navigating to the ‘Overall Volumes’ tab, and filtering the “HO offence code” drop down for:

• 13852 – Send false communication with intent to cause harm
• 00528 – Send communication threatening death or serious harm
• 00529 – Send electronic communication with flashing images with intent to harm an individual