How many of the 12,000 communications‑offence arrests in 2023 led to formal charges and convictions?
Executive summary
Official reporting assembled by journalists and parliamentarians shows roughly 12,183 people were arrested under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 in 2023, and about 1,119 of those arrested were convicted and sentenced—fewer than 10% of arrests [1] [2] [3]. Precise, centrally published figures for how many arrests progressed to a formal charge (as distinct from conviction) are not available in the public record cited here, because government arrest data are recorded by offence group and police custody records use varied codes that obscure charge pathways [4] [5].
1. The headline numbers: arrests vs convictions
Parliamentary reporting and investigative journalism converge on a 2023 arrest total of roughly 12,183 for communications offences under the two statutes commonly cited—an aggregate built from police custody and FOI returns analysed by The Times and repeated in Hansard [1] [4]. Ministry of Justice figures used by those journalists and subsequent explainers show convictions or sentencings in 2023 numbered about 1,119, a fall from earlier years and equivalent to under 10% of the arrest figure, a statistic highlighted explicitly in parliamentary debate [1] [2] [3].
2. Why the gap between arrests and convictions matters
The large divergence—over 90% of arrests not ending in a conviction—signals either that many arrests do not lead to prosecutions, that cases are diverted or disposed of without conviction, or that recording and classification create apparent gaps; reporting notes convictions have declined even as arrests rose, and the Ministry of Justice data underpinning those conviction counts were the basis for The Times’ claim [4] [2]. Analysts and civil liberties groups have warned that the sheer number of arrests, combined with low conviction rates, raise questions about arrest criteria and potential chilling effects on speech [4] [6].
3. Formal charges: the reporting lacuna
None of the provided sources publishes a single definitive national count of how many of the roughly 12,000 arrests in 2023 led to a formal charge; the Home Office publishes arrests by offence group rather than by individual offence, and police custody records use varied Reason for Arrest codes that make automated extraction of charging outcomes difficult—Metropolitan Police FOI responses explicitly caution about the limits of custody coding [4] [5]. Journalists have relied on FOI returns from a subset of forces and Ministry of Justice sentencing data to infer outcomes, but that approach cannot substitute for a central table of arrests→charges→prosecutions for the whole year [4] [2].
4. What partial figures and related metrics show
While a precise number of charges tied to the 2023 arrests is absent from the cited sources, related metrics in reporting provide context: The Times/MoJ analysis showed convictions of 1,119 in 2023 [2] [3], Freedom House and Hansard echo the “fewer than 10%” figure [1] [6], and later coverage cites prosecutions under newer Online Safety Act provisions separately (for example, 292 charged for certain offences under the OSA between its coming-into-force and early 2025) — underscoring that prosecutions are tracked across overlapping statutes and timeframes, complicating a neat arrest→charge→conviction accounting [6] [7].
5. How to interpret the available evidence and its limits
The best-supported, directly cited answer from public reporting is that about 1,119 of the roughly 12,183 arrests in 2023 resulted in convictions and sentences—a conviction rate under 10%—but the exact number that resulted in a formal charge (without eventual conviction) cannot be reliably stated from the sources provided, because centralised charging data linked to those specific arrests are not published and police custody coding practices undermine straightforward reconciliation [1] [4] [5]. The Crown Prosecution Service guidance shows charging decisions sit behind procedural filters and cross‑referencing with other offences, further muddying simple tallies [7].