Suella Braverman’s sex offender crackdown won’t work

It’s easy to see the thinking behind Suella Braverman’s plan announced in Manchester today to prevent sex offenders changing their name. In a country without ID cards or universal means of identification, it is fairly easy discreetly to disappear if you are at the margins of society, and possibly even to find a way of claiming at least some form of social security. This obviously defeats much of the object of having a sex offenders’ register, since it can in too many cases reduce the official record to something more like Gogol’s rentroll of dead souls.

True, it is already technically a crime for anyone on the register not to tell the police of any change of name, address, or other details. But enforcement can be tricky: in the year to March 2022 some 30 sex offenders a week were prosecuted or cautioned for omitting to do this, and it is a racing certainty that a great many more have quietly vanished from sight without being caught.