Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, in what proportion of complaints of crime reported to the police there was a digital or cyber element in each of the last three years.

The Home Office does not hold the requested information. Information on the number of crimes that take place online or involve an online element is not routinely collected from all police forces.

In order to understand the scale of online offences the Home Office has introduced a voluntary ‘online flag’ as part of the police recorded crime data collection. This allows police forces to record online instances of crimes such
as stalking and harassment. These offences could have taken place solely online, or had an online element to them.

The ‘online flag’ was introduced at the beginning of 2014/15, and data have been provided by a small number of forces on a voluntary basis since then. These data are currently still in development. The online flag will become
mandatory for all police forces from the start of 2015/16, allowing statistics to be published once the data have been quality assured.