At least 13,000 Child Abduction Warning Notices carrying no legal power or punishment if breached were issued to suspected child abusers between 2008 and 2025, with critics accusing Keir Starmer of overseeing a system that sent warning letters instead of pursuing prosecutions when he was Britain’s top prosecutor.
Susan Boxall, whose daughter Georgie died aged 17 from a lethal overdose given by a 25-year-old man who had received two warning notices from police, stated: “Starmer has blood on his hands. I did everything I could do. They had two abduction orders and he breached them. I was pleading with the police, but no one seemed to do anything.”
The man found guilty of supplying the drugs that led to Georgie’s death had plied the teenager with substances from age 13 when their relationship began. Despite repeated contact with police, he was never charged with any sexual offences or grooming.
A serious case review into Georgie’s death completed in October 2014 was highly critical of the warning notices, finding the letters failed not because of “individual errors” by officers but because they were based on a “weak legal premise.”
Documents from Starmer’s time as Director of Public Prosecutions describe how the Prime Minister was “drafting and agreeing” warning notices with police chiefs that whistleblowers say have been given to suspected child rapists. The notices were drawn up as part of the CPS’s national strategy to tackle violence against women and girls.
Maggie Oliver, who exposed the Rochdale grooming gangs scandal, described them as “an Asbo for paedophiles.” The retired detective told the Express: “I worked on a case where we had identified 97 child abusers that investigation should have led to serious charges of child rape on a pretty industrial scale.”
Oliver continued: “I expected multiple charges of rape against possibly dozens of men, but instead they warned a couple of men under the child abduction warning notices. My opinion is they were used to get rid of a job.”
Reform UK shadow home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf declared the details made the Prime Minister’s position “completely untenable,” stating: “Instead of fighting for the full force of the law against vile grooming gang predators, Keir Starmer presided over a system that sent out weak and useless ‘warning letters’ to paedophiles.”
The Express investigation claimed the “early intervention tool” was “often used instead of evidence gathering,” with no research ever conducted into their effectiveness. One officer from Rotherham, quoted in the Independent Office for Police Conduct grooming gang investigation, raised concerns they were “dishing out” the notices “like confetti” whilst failing to follow up when they were breached.
In the wake of the Rochdale and Rotherham scandals, police forces across the country made Warning Notices a cornerstone of efforts to “disrupt” child sexual exploitation networks, as prosecutions are notoriously difficult to achieve. At least 13,000 were used between 2008-25, not including one of the largest single examples, Operation Sanctuary, which handed out 220 notices to men involved with a Newcastle-based grooming gang.
The Child Abduction Warning Notices, known officially as CAWNs, can be issued by junior police officers to people they believe to be engaged in inappropriate relationships with minors. They typically warn an adult they have no permission to associate, communicate or have any contact with the affected child.
Police state the notices – which were in use years before a 2010 document was published – are an effective way of protecting a child who is regularly missing but may also be used to address controlling, grooming type behaviour not associated with missing episodes. The notices carry no legal power or punishment if breached but can form part of a later prosecution.
Susan Boxall claimed the notices gave a “dangerous illusion of police action” in her daughter’s case, with the man who eventually supplied the fatal overdose having repeatedly breached the warnings without consequence.
No 10 did not comment on the Georgie Boxall case but claimed there had been a “mischaracterisation of the development of Child Abduction Warning Notices, which have been in use since at least the early 2000s.”
A spokesman for the Prime Minister stated: “They are not a substitute for prosecution. Instead, they act as a first line of defence to keep young people safe, and often as part of an ongoing investigation.”
The spokesman added: “As director of public prosecutions, the Prime Minister secured the first grooming gang prosecutions more than a decade ago, and now his government is doing more than any before it to root out this vile crime. Under this Government, police are reviewing over a thousand historic cases, convictions are at record highs, we are bringing in mandatory reporting and doubling support for survivors.”
Critics have declared the Prime Minister’s position “completely untenable” following the revelations about the scale of warning notice use during his tenure overseeing Britain’s prosecution service. The government has not provided statistics on how many of the 13,000 notices resulted in subsequent prosecutions or how many were breached without legal consequence.
