A horrified mother has slammed her landlord and the police after a registered child sex offender was sent out to help her and her five children move house. The woman, who wishes to be named as just Laurie, was moving between Aspire Housing properties in North Staffordshire when Chris Brown was recruited to assist.
She says the man's true identity was brought to her attention after he sent her daughter a friend request on Facebook the following day, Stoke Sentinel reports. The mother says the response to the incident from both Aspire and Staffordshire Police has seriously impacted her confidence in them.
Aspire has apologised for the incident but claimed the work being carried out wasn't a job that would have required background checks to be carried out on the firm it had contracted. Staffordshire Police said that no offence had been committed by Chris Brown at that time.
During the move, Brown was subject to a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) that he received in 2017, aged 29. He had been jailed for two years after exchanging explicit images with a 13-year-old boy.
Brown, who remains on the Sex Offenders Register, was back in court in August 2021 for breaching the order by deleting Snapchat messages. He told StokeonTrentLive that he had reason to believe from previous conversations with the girl that she was over the age of 18, which is a claim that Laurie strongly rejects.
Laurie, 33, who has four other young children living with her at home, said: “I’m baffled that the police seem to think that if someone just tells them they thought someone was over 18, that’s good enough for them. They haven’t investigated this properly at all as far as I’m concerned. They took no statements from me or my daughter, they just seem to have taken his word for it and left it at that. It’s disgusting.”
Brown was helping out local removal firm Bailey and Cooper Removals, which is owned by his stepfather, when he was sent out to the woman’s home. Laurie contacted the police after the Facebook friend request for her daughter arrived the next day.
She said: “I rang them and then later on they came back to me to say they’d been round to check his devices. That told me something was up, so I asked if that meant what I thought it meant, but they wouldn’t say. So we looked him up on Google and found out about his court cases.
"I was sick to my stomach. All they would say was that they’d been to see him and that as far as they were concerned, everything was ok. They were going on about ‘having a duty of care to him’ and all that.”
Staffordshire Police confirmed to StokeonTrentLive that it had visited Brown, and that there had been no breach of his SHPO. It's been reported that the now-expired SHPO imposed by the court did not forbid him from making contact with all children and was only applicable to boys under 18.
Laurie who found this 'astonishing' said: “Why would anyone impose an order that only protected boys, not girls as well? These orders should be made with the protection of all children in mind.”
It is understood that Brown's SHPO was not extended when he breached it in 2021. A spokesperson for Staffordshire Police said: “At the time of the incident, the individual was subject to a SHPO that only applied to boys aged under 18. These terms were set by the judge at the time of the previous court hearing.
"Following the allegations, we visited the individual on August 4, 2022, to conduct inquiries. The relevant officer spoke to the girl’s mother later the same day. No criminal offences were identified as part of our enquiries. We can only base our investigations on the evidence we have available and within the constraints of the court order issued, this particular incident does not meet the criteria for the breach of that order.”
When asked about the incident, Brown said: "With regard to the matter last August - yes, in the course of helping out on the job the woman and daughter started conversations with me and the daughter gave me the impression by what she said that she was over 18."
Aspire Housing said that the removal firm’s remit did not meet the criteria for a background disclosure check. Jon Dickin, Head of Neighbourhoods at Aspire Housing, said: “We have taken this incident very seriously and have been providing support to the customer and working with local partner organisations to help investigate the situation.
"On this occasion, we used a new contractor due to lack of availability from our usual supplier. We would like to reassure our customers that we will not be using this contractor to undertake any further work. We are sorry to hear about the impact this incident has had on the affected customer and their family, and we will continue to work with and support them in any way we can.”
A spokesperson for removal firm Bailey and Cooper Removals said: “We were short staffed, somebody suggested he would work for us that day. We didn’t know about his convictions. He hasn't worked for us since. We have got high standards, we would never hire someone like that intentionally.”
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