How do we get sexual predators out of the country’s police forces? It was one of the most urgent questions asked in 2021 when a serving police officer, PC Wayne Couzens, was charged with the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard. In the first report of Elish Angiolini’s inquiry into this dreadful sequence of events, published in February last year, she made the eminently sensible recommendation that any individual with a caution or conviction for a sexual offence should be rejected during police vetting.

It seemed the very least that should happen, yet we’ve learned from Lady Angiolini’s second report this week that the recommendation has yet to be implemented. She reveals that it took 18 months after publication for police chiefs to agree a blanket ban on recruits who have convictions, and even then it wasn’t included in draft Home Office regulations issued in September this year.

The Home Office has now told Angiolini that a ban will be included, but it won’t be retrospective. The delay is all the more astonishing because her first report highlighted a series of “lamentable and repeated” missed opportunities to stop Couzens, who was a heavy user of violent pornography and had a history of exposing himself in public. Couzens should never have been a police officer and neither should David Carrick, who was sent to prison for life in 2023 for committing sexual offences against more than a dozen women while serving in the same force.

Angiolini’s latest report offers an insight into the extent of the problem, revealing that checks against the police national database in 2023-24 led to 461 police officers, staff and volunteers being referred to “an appropriate authority”. Nine cases triggered further criminal investigations and 88 disciplinary investigations.

As........

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