How many arrests under section 127 and the Malicious Communications Act resulted in convictions in 2024?

1. What the question actually asks — convictions, not arrests or sentences

The user requests how many arrests produced convictions in 2024, a query that demands three distinct data points — (a) the number of arrests recorded under the two offence headings, (b) how many of those arrests resulted in prosecutions, and (c) how many prosecutions resulted in convictions — but the UK’s central statistics do not routinely publish arrest counts by these specific statutory sections and the Ministry of Justice aggregates sentencing data differently, so there is no single official table in the public domain that answers “arrests → convictions” for 2024 without reconstruction from FOIs and press analysis ^{[2] [3]}.

2. What the best available reporting shows for 2024

Investigative reporting summarising police FOI returns and MoJ datasets found that in 2024 some 1,160 people were prosecuted for malicious communications and that 137 received immediate custodial sentences that year, with the majority of those custodial terms being very short (under two months in the dataset cited) — this is the most concrete 2024 figure in the available sources, but it is a count of prosecutions and immediate custodial outcomes rather than a direct count of convictions emanating from the totality of arrests recorded under section 127 and section 1 ^[1].

3. The elephant in the room — gaps, definitions and legal changes that complicate counting

Several meta‑issues make a definitive “arrests-to-convictions-in-2024” number impossible from the sources: the Home Office publishes arrests by broad offence groups, not by statute, some police forces supplied FOI data while others did not, and the Online Safety Act 2023 changed the charging landscape on 31 January 2024 so some conduct formerly prosecuted under the old provisions could be charged under new offences after that date — the Lords Library explicitly notes that central government data is not held in the disaggregated form the question presumes, and journalists have had to rely on FOIs to approximate arrest totals ^{[2] [4]}.

4. Alternative readings and institutional incentives

News outlets and MPs have emphasised either the scale of arrests (for example reporting thousands arrested in 2023) or the low conversion to conviction or custody to argue opposite narratives — one framing suggests heavy‑handed policing of online speech, another emphasises that many arrests concern serious or non‑online communications and that prosecutions require evidence and prosecutorial discretion; Hansard cites 12,183 arrests in 2023 with about 1,119 convictions/sentencings to underline the low conversion rate, while the Times/FOI reporting underpinning 2024 figures stresses rising arrest counts with falling convictions — these competing emphases reflect different agendas: civil‑liberties concerns about over‑criminalisation versus official policing claims about capturing a wide range of harmful communications ^{[3] [1] [2]}.

5. Bottom line and what cannot be asserted from the sources

Bottom line: there is no single authoritative official figure in the material reviewed that states exactly how many arrests under section 127 and the Malicious Communications Act in 2024 resulted in convictions; the best available published reconstructions show 1,160 prosecutions for malicious communications in 2024 and 137 immediate custodial sentences that year, but those numbers do not equate to a definitive arrests‑to‑convictions tally and cannot be treated as a complete answer without further FOI aggregation or MoJ breakdown by statutory provision ^{[1] [2]}.