A cut too far

Take the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. It has performed invaluable work in protecting young people from paedophiles using the internet, and social networking sites, to prey on their next victims. A financial price cannot be placed on the lives that this organisation has protected, and even saved.

Yet despite this, and the entirely justifiable concerns of the police who recognise that internet-inspired crimes, including paedophilia, will become even more prolific in the years ahead, Home Secretary Theresa May wants the organisation to be assimilated into a new National Crime Agency.

She is wrong – and she must think again – following the resignation of child protection chief Jim Gamble and some of his colleagues. Of course, no publicly-funded body should be immune from the efficiency drive underway. No quango should be exempt from savings. But this does not justify the way in which Mrs May is putting dogma before her public responsibility, as a Minister, to protect young people from society's sexual predators.