It started with Jack Morgan. A rumour I heard in Ukraine turned out to be true — a British paedophile had managed to get a job working with orphans in the warzone. This story I wrote was eventually published by the Telegraph, where we challenged the Scottish-registered charity for failing to run any checks on its employees. The months of messages to court officials and police about this case also gave me a window into how hundreds more registered sex-offenders in Britain are disappearing from records — by travelling between force areas, travelling abroad, or changing their names. This is what happened.
Jack Morgan wasn’t the paedophile’s real name. He was convicted under the name Lee Callaghan, and spent two years in prison before reoffending under his new name. He travelled from Britain to Ukraine without being stopped because his Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) did not include a travel ban. When a travel ban is issued, an offender’s record is shared by the court with the UK passport authority. Where no ban exists, the court relies on an offender’s honesty to let their local police station know they are planning a foreign trip. Morgan didn’t.
As soon as Morgan entered Ukraine he became Ukraine’s problem.
The new Police, Crimes and Sentencing Bill 2025 moving through parliament touches on name-changes and travel bans, yet fails to close either of the loopholes letting dangerous individuals through the net. Given that the Bill is a notoriously tough piece of legislation granting police unprecedented power to arrest peaceful protesters and deport foreign criminals, this is more than just ironic — it is a statement about which crimes the government believes are important.
Della Wright, who was sexually abused as a 6-year old by a man who later changed his name and abused other children, has campaigned for “Della’s Law” to ban sex-offender name changes. The new Bill presents a compromise — sex offenders are expected to notify police of new names. This formalises an arrangement already used by courts, and unfortunately, it’s not working. Police often hold information on name changes, but cannot always access it, nor disclose it fast enough to prevent future victims.
Staffordshire Police was asked to reveal how many sex-offenders who changed their names had done so legally, and refused, arguing that the manual search of 176 name-change records would take too long. West Yorkshire Police refused a similar request for the same reason. This lack of transparency causes delays, putting the balance of power in the hands of abusers. As I witnessed during the Morgan investigation.
The Telegraph needed a document proving that Morgan had changed his name before we could publish and expose him. The court had this document. Despite sending evidence, including photographs of Morgan playing with small children abroad in breach of a court order, it took several months to get the document. The initial wait of 20 days was to be expected — but a further round of checks (including an attempt to gain Morgan’s personal permission) seemed dangerous under the circumstances. Thankfully, the convicted paedophile did not use his right to contest the exposure of his identity; his escape from the country had been so thorough that the court could not find any way to contact him.
The new Bill increases the level of detail a sex-offender is expected to share with police before travelling abroad, but offers no provisions for what happens if an offender fails to inform police of travel plans in the first place. It is not just Morgan who took advantage of this loophole — the NCA has stated that 10 sex-offenders travelled from Britain to Poland without notifying police, soon after the invasion of Ukraine.
How big is this problem? The data we do have — based on FOI requests to local police forces — continues to highlight worrying numbers of sex offenders classified as “missing” or “wanted” across the whole country. The data we don’t have also has a story to tell.
In 2023, the BBC made headlines with the revelation that 729 sex-offenders were “missing or wanted,” in a survey of all 45 forces over a three year period. This year, a further series of requests was made to local forces.
Police Scotland announced that it has 17 “wanted” sex-offenders, 15 of whom are abroad. West Yorkshire Police insisted that it “only” has 14 wanted sex-offenders. North Wales Police (one of the few forces to provide details of convictions) had the same number of missing offenders — 14. These brief lines make grim reading: rape; rape, rape, sexual assault of a female child under the age of 13, inciting a child to perform a sexual act, making indecent photographs of children.
Behind each of these numbers there is a real person who has been hurt. Often this person is a child.
How many sex-offenders were missing or wanted for arrest between 2021-2025? reads one request to Wiltshire Police. Answer: The data is not held. A data return for these years is also not possible due to some of the registered sex offenders having been transferred to other force areas who then oversee their management.
The problem of geographic jurisdiction was something I saw when retracing Morgan’s final days in Wales. I contacted South Wales Police, as I knew there had been an attempt to report Morgan to this force. South Wales argued that it had been brought into a case that had “nothing to do with us” due to another force mistakenly sharing an old address in its jurisdiction for Morgan, who had moved to another area of Wales before absconding to Ukraine. I was redirected to Dafyd Powys Police, who refused to comment. Several police press officers told me to refer to MAPPA.
MAPPA is the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangement for registered sex-offenders. It sets out the rules for information-sharing between forces, prisons, and parole services, as well as housing authorities and social services who play a part in an offender’s life after prison. The 168-page guide is thoughtful and detailed — but relies on a long list of often underfunded agencies working in perfect coordination. Recently The Times reported on the chaos in the probation service, just one the agencies on whom MAPPA depends.
There are rules for transfer of files to a new force (a transitional period of contact is recommended when a prisoner moves house), and rules about disclosure to the public; specifically “a presumption in favour of disclosure” when potential victims are at risk. MAPPA is supposed to keep everyone safe. In practice, it is being used to silence the press or public who bring in evidence about an offender — which should be easy to check against a central database — and the lack of clarity over which body is in charge allows multiple police forces to play “pass-the-parcel” with dangerous criminals.
My pursuit of Morgan led me to the NCA, which hosts the UK’s contact point for Interpol. Cases are sent here if an offender “absconds” from a local force. For journalists, the NCA is often where the trail goes cold. Unlike the Home Office, which answers thousands of requests per year and is never far from the headlines, the NCA is not a “public body” and does not have to answer. The two departments mirror each other in function — with the Home Office covering immigration, asylum, and borders, and the NCA dealing with fugitives and organised crime. Yet the respective rules on information disclosure could not be further apart. We have access to much of the data on crimes committed by asylum seekers and foreign-national offenders — and will soon have more — but the crimes committed by our own citizens against foreign victims are hidden from us. This is especially worrying in the cases of the British sex-offenders who are reported as “missing or wanted” by local forces and are subsequently impossible to trace further.
Whether to disclose sensitive information on sex-offenders on request is a moral and philosophical question
We know the UK has a problem with overseas child sexual abuse. The Home Office released a list of 22 countries where children are at high risk of exploitation by UK nationals, including the Philippines, Uganda, and China. There were high-profile cases of known offenders travelling abroad and abusing other victims — such as Mark Frost (formerly known as Andrew Tracey) now serving a life-sentence for raping boys in Thailand, and John Smythe, whose violent abuse of teenagers at religious summer camps in Britain and Zimbabwe was covered up by the highest levels of the Church of England. These cases are the tip of the iceberg.
The Foreign Office publishes partial data on “requests for consular assistance abroad” by UK nationals. It is possible to work out how many times UK citizens asked for help after being arrested or detained for child-sex offences abroad: between 41 and 92 times in 2021, between 22 and 88 times in 2022, and between 6 and 24 times in 2023. Even if we use the lowest possible figures — we are looking at 69 individual incidents over a three year period. And this number could be as high as 133. Significant arrests figures for other sexual offences abroad can also be found in these documents.
We don’t know what proportion of these claimants were charged, and there may be unsung success stories of our consulate working behind the scenes to release someone falsely accused of a crime. Yet given that contacting the consulate is optional after an arrest abroad, this data is more likely to relate to British citizens travelling legally than to fugitives (a fugitive would have to decide whether the risk of alerting foreign authorities to a criminal record or a travel ban outweighed the benefits of help from their home country).
Firstly, this means the “requests for assistance” figures are likely to be lower than the real number of foreign arrests. And secondly, with so many foreign arrests of British citizens who may have no prior criminal record for sexual offences, the fact that so few of the nation’s 67,000 registered sex-offenders are subject to any travel restrictions should be a greater cause for concern. Over a decade ago, an Association of Chief Police Officers review of travel-bans found that the system presented an “unnecessary and unreasonable obstruction to the objective of preventing sexual abuse of children, most particularly in vulnerable jurisdictions.” This is still true today.
Reform is urgently needed. There has been rightful anger about the years of inactivity on grooming gangs — now would be a good opportunity for the full scale of historic and current child-abuse in this country to be understood, taking into account the additional issues of missing and wanted offenders.
Closing the legal loopholes on name-changes and travel restrictions for sex offenders is a matter for the government and the courts and will take time — as will improving the system for data-sharing and case-transfer between police forces. But whether or not to disclose sensitive information on sex-offenders on request is a moral and philosophical question as well as a legal one. All the institutions discussed here have to weigh two potential harms when deciding whether to grant a request — the harm of “outing” someone as a rapist or paedophile when they may be rebuilding their life, versus the harm of withholding information that may prevent further victims. Neither option is good — but surely the latter is worse?
We need to ask why our legal system continues to place the right to privacy of those who have already committed unspeakable crimes against children above the right of children to be kept safe.
