ONE of Merseyside’s top police officers has said he can’t promise to stop another grooming scandal like the one that saw Wirral newsagent brothers given prison sentences last year for preying on teenage girls.

Police superintendent Ian Hassall said it would be “naive” to say cases like the one that saw Ilavarasan and Vinothan Rajenthiram jailed for over 30 years collectively won’t happen again – but that “big strides” had been taken to reduce that risk.

Speaking in front of Wirral Council’s children and families overview and scrutiny committee on Tuesday, Supt Hassall explained: “I think it would be naive for me to sit here and make promises that I couldn’t deliver.

“What I do know is that in the two and a half years that I have been back on the Wirral as a police commander, I think our working relationship with the partners [including the council’s children’s services department] has never been closer.

“We have taken big strides to mitigate the risks but it’s a hard thing to totally eradicate.”

A presentation delivered by Supt Hassall said an act introduced last year meant new safeguarding arrangements led by the council working together with the police and Wirral Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).

The Children and Social Work Act is aimed at effectively sharing information, holding partner agencies to account, and early identification of safeguarding issues, meaning the public can feel confident children are protected from harm.

It will do that by using data analysis, auditing, peer reviews, feedback from children and families, views of front-line professionals, regular learning events, inspection results and research findings, he said.

It comes following the Rajenthiram brothers’ conviction in May 2017, after they groomed and sexually exploited teenage girls from a Birkenhead newsagents run by their family – one of the victims was in Wirral’s care.

The trial heard poor record keeping undermined the prosecution case – with defence lawyers arguing a lack of documents detailing fears she was in an under-age sexual relationship meant those fears had not actually existed.

Supt Hassall said work done since last year and new arrangements organised by the council, NHS and police working together had seen some “positive results”, adding: “Some of the issues that led to missed opportunities along the way probably set us on a track to try and overcome that and minimise the opportunities for that to happen in the future.”

But he said the difficulty with crimes like these were that it’s “not just a Wirral-based issue”.

He added: “Merseyside has always been a great exporter of drug trafficking in some shape or form – whether that’s using young people to do it or not is a different debate.

“Organised criminality has clearly identified gaps in the market and opportunities. When you look at sexual exploitation, that’s not often solely contained within one area because of social media and the internet. So I can’t truthfully say it will never take place again.

“What I can say is we have got greater working together, greater intelligence and information sharing. We have improved no end our first line practitioners’ understanding of these issues through multi-agency training.

“A lot of the work we are doing to have joint investigations and joint working in the same environment gives us the opportunity to when, God forbid, we do identify these cases, mitigate the risk to others and the size of that risk at a much quicker rate, and very quickly pick up these associations. We are able through our analytics team to map connections and share information with councils.”

He was responding to a question by committee member Cllr David Burgess-Joyce, asking if measures to be put in place “will avoid us getting down the route of some of the grooming issues that we had recently on the Wirral”.

Cllr Burgess-Joyce added: “I feel comforted that you are all working together and there have been lessons learnt.”

Paul Boyce, corporate director for children’s services at Wirral council, said that now with a more integrated approach, officers can sit in the same room and work together on cases, which has been a “significant” step.

He added: “I could never say that we will stop children being exploited because that would be naive – our approach has been designed to reduce the risks.

“When we find risks, we work together to protect and safeguard.”