Hertfordshire Constabulary is “improving” its processes to clamp down on organised paedophile rings, which its boss admitted were “not perfect” in the past.
Chief Constable Andy Prophet sat down with the force’s Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), Jonathan Ash-Edwards, for their accountability and performance meeting on Thursday, December 11.
The meeting allows the PCC to ask questions of the chief constable and to hold him to account. Mr Ash-Edwards asked the chief constable about an effectiveness report into tackling group-based child sexual exploitation, carried out by police watchdog HMICFRS (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services).
The watchdog’s report, published in October, was a follow-up to a large-scale investigation from 2015 to 2022 by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which found “harrowing failures” across public bodies in protecting children from organised paedophile groups.
Criticisms of police forces included weak data collection, use of victim-blaming language, “inconsistent definitions” of group‑based child sexual exploitation and a lack of national understanding about the true scale of the threat.
HMICFRS noted: “We found encouraging signs of progress, despite a two-year period of challenging policing budgets.
“Police forces are increasingly responding decisively and swiftly to reports involving vulnerable children at risk of sexual exploitation. As a result, more children are being safeguarded, and more suspects are being arrested.”
Referring to the report, PCC Jonathan Ash-Edwards said: “This was published fairly recently and was a follow-up report to a national inspection [IICSA] done a couple of years ago, that wasn’t specific to Hertfordshire, it was a national piece of work, but we’ve had recommendations for all police forces.”
The PCC asked the chief constable for his assessment of the force’s performance in tackling child exploitation.
“Improving, I think, would be my one-word assessment,” said the chief constable.
“Historically, I think that some of our systems and processes to understand vulnerable groups, movement of vulnerable children or vulnerable adults in and out of the county, how we shared data with other key partners, other key agencies, in and out of Hertfordshire, were not perfect.
“We are doing a huge amount of work at the moment to close the gaps in relation to that. We are bringing together in my team what we call an ‘exploitation hub’.
"So all our teams that have been looking at child exploitation, missing children, missing adults, vulnerable adults, and modern slavery.
"We’re bringing it together in a single place. So all the knowledge is in one team.
“We’re working really carefully with all our partners in the county and outside to make sure that we’ve got systematic processes every day and every week to share information so we have the best possible chance to identify patterns of behaviour or risk where individuals may be targeted by another group of individuals.
“This is what it’s about, groups of individuals – always men, in reality – targeting children for sexual exploitation. So, we’re doing an awful lot to tighten up. Historically, it’s not been perfect – we’re getting better at it.”
Mr Ash-Edwards then asked if the force had adopted the IICSA definition of group-based child sexual exploitation.
The chief constable said: “Yes… Broadly speaking, there’s a fairly wordy definition, which we have accepted in full. What it broadly says is that an organised network is two or more people.
“So it might be two people, it might be 32 people, who are known to each other, and who are involved in or facilitate the exploitation of children. That is the definition, and we’ve adopted it in full.
“We have been working really closely in recent months with the national team, the Hydrant team, who are driving forward this national best practice around group-based child sexual exploitation. Within our profile that we published in the summer, we’ve identified a number of themes that work, that we want to develop, which I’ve alluded to.
“[These include] the improvement of our data and intelligence picture, sharing it within the constabulary, within other forces, and around that partnership is a key part of that.
“Also, making sure that we’re further investing in training of our people, frontline officers, call-handlers, intelligence officers – so everyone in the organisation has an understanding of the potential issues we need to spot here, working with partners, schools, parents, youth groups, so everyone has as broad and clear an eye on this as possible.”
The HMICFRS report stated that although improvements have been made across forces, “significant challenges remain” in tackling group-based child sexual exploitation, adding that the Home Office and Department for Education have yet to fully adopt the IICSA definition.
The report added: “More than half of police forces still fail to include data from partners, such as charitable organisations and children’s social care, in their strategic assessments, and some misapply the IICSA definition altogether. These issues risk weakening the policing response and failing children.
“The Home Office hasn’t yet stopped collecting data from forces that serves no meaningful purpose. And inaccurate and inconsistent flagging of child sexual exploitation on many police management systems means that vital early opportunities to identify and protect children are being missed.”
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