Two Home Office ministers were fighting for their careers last night after it emerged that senior police had alerted them to problems over Britons convicted abroad.
Chief constables wrote to Tony McNulty, the Police Minister, three months ago and the letter was then passed to Joan Ryan, a junior minister. The letter advised Mr McNulty that, given earlier problems over foreign national prisoners, it might be wise for the Home Secretary to be briefed on the issue — a suggestion that should have rung alarm bells with the two ministers.
Ms Ryan signed a letter acknowledging receipt of the alert on December 6, the Association of Chief Police Officers confirmed last night.
The letter to Mr McNulty was sent in October, when the Home Office turned down a request from the association for cash to trace hundreds of dangerous convicted offenders.
The disclosure increases the pressure on John Reid and his ministerial team over the fiasco surrounding thousands of Britons convicted abroad whose records were left lying in the Home Office.
The Home Office has insisted that it knew nothing about the backlog or request for extra cash.
Ms Ryan said on Tuesday night after the scandal broke: “It is the case that we knew nothing of this. As far as we are aware no ministers knew of this until lunchtime.”
And yesterday she told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “I have asked [to] see every single piece of paper related to this issue since May 2006 so I can be absolutely, categorically sure that what I am telling you is the absolute, honest truth.”
As the political crisis deepened, senior officials in Downing Street were last night studying the letter sent to Mr McNulty. Although it made no mention of the backlog of 27,500 files it did highlight the problem of British citizens who had been convicted of offences abroad not being placed on databases.
Samagingly for Mr McNulty and Ms Ryan, it also suggests that, given the foreign national prisoner scandal of last summer, they might wish to inform John Reid, the Home Secretary.
Mr Reid was sent to the Home Office after the resignation of his predecessor, Charles Clarke, over the foreign national prisoner scandal. He was seen as someone who could get a grip on the Department and sort out its problems.
Last night sources at Westminster suggested that Mr McNulty was the most vulnerable of the two ministers.
The Home Office confirmed that a letter concerning the issue of processing information about foreign convictions was sent to Mr McNulty. It focused on general issues concerning the processing from foreign countries and not the backlog.
A Home Office spokeswoman said that the letter was referred from Mr McNulty’s private office to Ms Ryan’s office. In the intervening months it has been left to three police officers working in Hampshire to sift through the thousands of files, produce a list of the most dangerous offenders and start putting them on the Police National Computer.
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said that Mr Reid had told MPs at lunchtime that he would consider a request for more cash to deal with the crisis, “yet within hours we discover a request was made last year but the Home Secretary and his ministers never heard about it”.
He said: “John Reid is fast resembling Mañuel from Fawlty Towers, who made a habit of declaring ‘I know nothing’. This mixture of ignorance and incompetence would be comic if it did not jeopardise public safety in the way that it has.”
Police have assessed 540 of the 27,500 offenders as the most serious. Their convictions include murder, rape, robbery and child sex abuse.
Mr Reid told MPs in a Commons statement that 280 could not be accurately identified and placed on the police computers and other databases to protect the public because the records were inadequate.
Police are contacting authorities in Switzerland, France, Greece, Norway Luxembourg, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Poland, Turkey, Bulgaria and Slovakia for more information.
The details of another 260 offenders have been entered on the police computer, including 149 who were already on the system. Staff at the Criminal Records Bureau have been ordered to check whether any of them have been given the all-clear to work with children or vulnerable adults.
Mr Reid has told police to deal with the rest of the backlog within about three months.
The latest blunder by the Home Office triggered a furious exchange in Prime Minister’s Questions, with David Cameron, the Tory leader, describing Mr Reid as Labour’s “fourth failing home secretary”.
Later Mr Reid admitted that before the new system came into operation in May 2006, the process for handling information on British criminals convicted abroad had been fragmented and piecemeal.
But he did not explain how the backlog of 27,000 files built up in the judicial co-operation unit.Home Office sources said that some of the information was in a foreign language, included no fingerprints or photographs or the sentence the offender had been given.
The failing in the Home Office unit is now the focus of an inquiry to be conducted by a senior civil servant from outside the department.
The firing line
These are questions that were put to the Home Office by The Times yesterday regarding the furore over the British criminals who were convicted abroad, and over matters of Home Office restructuring:
From when does the backlog of 27,529 offenders date? Largely 1999, but some from a few years earlier.
Do the 27,529 documents refer to the convictions of British citizens? They are being worked through at the moment.
What was the job of the UK central authority for Mutual Legal Assistance in the Home Office? The job was to process the documents.
Did it hand any documents to the police? Some were sent to other organisations. Some were looked at but because of scant information on the files nothing was done.
Who headed the department? We are not going to give that information.
How many people were employed in the unit? I cannot answer that question.
How many directors in the Home Office have moved jobs since John Reid announced restructuring? There are 52 directors. Three have moved to other work in the department. Six have left the department, of whom three have moved elsewhere in government and three taken early retirement. Four others have moved as a result of ordinary promotion or normal retirement. Discussions about the future of three other directors are continuing.
What payoffs have been made to departing staff? No answer was provided.
What has happened to other senior staff at the Home Office? No answer was provided.
