London postcode where most parents have asked the police if someone they know is a sex offender

Hundreds of parents have asked the Metropolitan Police if someone they know is a pedophile in London. According to data provided to MyLondon under the Freedom of Information Act, more than 600 concerned parents, guardians and carers asked London Police if anyone in their area was a child sex offender between 2018 and 2024.

Requests can be made under Sarah’s Law, which is a system that allows a parent, guardian or carer of a concerned child to check if a person is a registered sex offender. Sarah’s Law is named after eight-year-old Sarah Payne, who was murdered by a sex offender in 2000.

The scheme allows the public to ask about the history of a person who has access to their child, but each request for information is dealt with on a case-by-case basis. A third party, such as a friend of a parent, can make a request but cannot receive any information themselves because it is disclosed to the person best placed to protect the child.

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But the number of worried parents is far higher in one area of ​​London than anywhere else. Until 2022, the Metropolitan Police recorded claims by borough, but this changed to recording claims by postcode, grouping three to four boroughs.

However, this shows the harsh reality that there have been many more worried family members in a London postcode over the past two years. The ‘SN’ postcode, which includes Bromley, Croydon and Sutton, received 98 inquiries about potential pedophiles from 2022 to 2024.

And combined with police records by district for the years 2018 to 2022, it adds up to 125 requests made by concerned parents to police about people in their area. In postcode SN, the number increases significantly between 2021 and 2022 – from 13 requests in 2021 to 35 in 2022, then 49 in 2023.

This compares with the postcode with the next highest number of concerned parents, which is the ‘SE’ area of ​​London, which includes Bexley, Greenwich and Lewisham. There were a total of 70 requests in the postcode as of January 2022, which is 28 fewer requests than in SN.

This number rises to 93 when the last four years of data recorded by district are included, with the figures increasing significantly in 2022.

In the boroughs of Kingston, Richmond, Merton and Wandsworth, all in the “SW” (South West) London postcode, the number of Sarah’s Law claims was recorded at 57, while in East London the number of claims was only two. less at 55 in the EA boroughs of Barking & Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge.

The area of ​​least concern for parents

The postcode with the least worried parents was ‘CN’, which includes just two boroughs, Camden and Islington. There were just 15 applications made between 2022 and 2024, with none made so far this year, according to FOI data.

This amounts to 26 requests in total between 2018 and 2024, with only one request reported by the police in the postcode in 2018. However, when providing the data to MyLondon, a representative from the force’s data rights team London police said: “It should be noted that the data is accurate from 2023 onwards.”

They added that before this date the data was managed by various people and that between 2018 and 2020, Sarah’s Law applications were incorrectly classified.

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