Liz Truss urged to 'learn from Rotherham abuse scandal' and scrap national crime targets

During her campaign, Ms Truss promised to bring back targets and rank force’s performances in league tables, in a bid to secure a 20 per cent reduction in murders, other violent crimes and burglaries within two years.

However, South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner Alan Billings has warned this could prompt officers to focus on crimes which come with a target and “neglect” others.

“In South Yorkshire we would be especially concerned,” he said.

“The reason the police here failed to recognise the growing scourge of child sexual abuse between 1997 and 2013 was in part because they were concentrating on other crimes that had been made targets.

“Lessons learned then must not be lost because ‘targets’ are a popular idea and sound like common sense.”

In June, The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found South Yorkshire Police failed to protect children from sexual exploitation and investigate many allegations of abuse during the scandal, which involved at least 1,400 victims.

The six-year investigation found officers did not respond effectively in many cases, as they believed young victims were “consenting to their exploitation”, but they had also been told to focus on other crimes, such as burglary and assault, to meet national targets.

The IOPC found officers had left victims in cars and at properties with their abusers on numerous occasions, failed to properly investigate allegations of sexual assault or even take statements from victims in some cases, and failed to “effectively disrupt” the activity of known abusers and act on intelligence.

Fourteen officers were found to have a case to answer for misconduct or gross misconduct, after 47 were investigated, but none of them have been dismissed from the force.

During her leadership campaign, Ms Truss also said police officers need to “get back to basics” and “spend their time investigating real crimes, not Twitter rows and hurt feelings.”

But Dr Billings also told the new Conservative Party leader that police forces are already “overwhelmed by demand” and much of their time is spent dealing with “non crimes”, such as missing persons reports and mental health incidents.

"One major consequence of the years of austerity was that the police became the default emergency service for the welfare state,” he said.

“As a result. police numbers now give a false impression of the resources available to fight crime when officers are also having to do so many other things.

“If we want the police to fight crime we need to deal with this sort of non-crime demand differently.

“We need a new group of professional people – Welfare Support Assistants – who have appropriate medical training, perhaps employed by the NHS or the local authority, who can work alongside the police and deal with those incidents.”