Met investigates its vetting 'errors' during rush to hire recruits

Scotland Yard is urgently making checks on whether it bungled the vetting of hundreds of officers after concerns that inadequate measures may been taken to assess whether new recruits posed a criminal risk.

- Vikram Dodd

About 300 new recruits may have had substandard or no vetting to see if they had criminal convictions, cautions or criminal associations and whether their integrity was at risk because of debt.

The Metropolitan police are carrying out an internal review into the scale and severity of the problem.

The concerns centre on recruitment between 2016 and 2023. The bulk of the recruitment happened during the police uplift programme from 2020 to 2023.

The Conservative government, having cut police staffing by 20,000 officers since 2010, then decided to hire 20,000 new officers in three years, putting forces under pressure to recruit large numbers in a hurry.

The potential errors predate Mark Rowley becoming commissioner, and relate to when Cressida Dick was in charge of Britain's largest police force.