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Scotland Yard is urgently making checks on whether it bungled the vetting of hundreds of officers after concerns they may have used inadequate measures when hiring them to see if they posed a criminal risk.
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 is carrying out an internal review into the scale and severity of the problem, the force confirmed.
The concerns centre on the recruitment the Met carried out between 2016 and 2023. The bulk of the recruitment happened during the police uplift programme under the last government, from 2020 to 2023.
The Conservatives, 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.
The new questions about the Met’s competence in carrying out basic checks on the integrity of new recruits are known within Whitehall. Officials are considering ordering an investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct or His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary.
The potential error was picked up by the force itself earlier this year and has not been made public yet. Other forces may have made similar errors. One source said: “Mistakes were made to let people in.”
The Met confirmed to the Guardian that it is urgently revetting recruits whose appointment may have followed defective vetting. Those within their two-year probation period would be easier to dismiss than those who have passed their probationary period and have full rights.
The Met has long had problems with its vetting. Rowley became commissioner in September 2022 after the ousting of Dick, who was seen to have been slow in realising the scale of the scandals the Met faced and how severely they were damaging public trust and confidence.
In a statement, the Met said: “We can confirm there is a review ongoing as part of our wider work on standards, vetting and professionalism. It is a review of vetting and hiring practices between 2016 and 2023.
“This is part of our determined effort to raise professional standards across the organisation and increase trust and confidence within our communities.”
A report by Louise Casey in October 2022, commissioned by the Met, found that people suspected of serious criminal offences including sexual assault and domestic abuse had been allowed to join or stay in the force.
The Casey review and other damning reports led Rowley to say: “There must be hundreds of people that shouldn’t be here, who should be thrown out. There must be hundreds who are behaving disgracefully, undermining our integrity and need ejecting.”
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In the first three years of his five-year term as commissioner there has been a big increase in the number of officers forced out, with more than 1,400 officers and staff removed.
Police chiefs fear the revelations of new failings in vetting may damage trust and confidence in the Met.
A report ordered by the government on the case of Wayne Couzens, the Met officer who in March 2021 used his police powers to kidnap and then murder Sarah Everard, found vetting failures and said he should never have been an officer.
The report by Elish Angiolini said vetting detected that Couzens was in debt when he applied to join the Civil Nuclear Constabulary in 2011. He should have been rejected but was not, and then joined the Met in 2018 when a fresh error was made. He was given a gun and allowed to join an elite unit.
The police uplift programme to hire 20,000 new officers began in 2020, with the Conservative government funding the new posts. Each of the 43 local forces in England and Wales were set a target for the number of new recruits they had to hire. The Met was the only force to miss its target.
