Breaking the web

Taylor, 31, faces a minimum prison term of three years but in order for the punishment to fit the crime, which involved the sexual assault of a baby and the possession of more than 300,000 indecent images, he must serve far longer.

His crimes showed him to be a deceitful and dangerous individual who breached the trust of families and exploited children on a long-term basis. He should only be considered for release when he has demonstrated, over a very sustained period, that he is no longer a threat to children.

Sadly there are many other men and women like Taylor, even if they do not reach his level of notoriety. Detectives at West Yorkshire Police have, however, been at the forefront of the fight against paedophilia, and the use of computers and the internet to practice it, over the last decade. Their successes, and the arrest of hundreds of suspects by Yorkshire’s four forces in Operation Ore in 2004, underlines the breadth of child sex crime in Britain. Today there are concerns, however, that the work of the police could be undermined by public spending cuts.

Britain’s specialist unit, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), is set to be taken into the National Crime Agency only five years after it was set up. The fact that Jim Gamble resigned as chief executive of Ceop late last year illustrates the level of concern over how the re-organisation will affect attempts to track down paedophiles.

The case against Taylor, which used file-sharing technology and software from the United States, was the first of its kind in Yorkshire. As Det Supt Steve Waite said yesterday it showed that police officers need to be highly skilled to catch the most prolific paedophiles.

Their work must not be hindered by the actions of cost-cutting Ministers.