A WOMAN whose childhood sexual abusers were jailed earlier this month “wouldn’t have been in court at all” if a caution from the 1990s was still on record.

The mother of a girl who was assaulted in 1996 says that if the caution Timothy Chambers had received for that offence had remained on record he would not have been allowed to continue to work with children.

She was speaking after Chambers was jailed on Thursday, July 4, alongside Christopher Lawn, for sexually assaulting a girl in Llandrindod Wells.

Chambers, 51, of Loudon Square, Butetown, Cardiff, was found guilty after trial of three counts of sexual activity with a child, and was sentenced to five years in prison at Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court.

He was a cadet leader for St John Ambulance, and it was through this position of “trust”, the court heard, that he met the girl he abused.

He also sexually assaulted a teenager in 1996, years before he went on to sexually abuse the victim in the case that went before the court.

For the first offence he received a caution, but it was no longer on his record. A fact which led the victim in the second case to say that she felt “let down by the police” in her impact statement read out in court.

“That’s why he was still working with young people,” said the mother of Chambers' first victim. She went as far to say that he would never have been able to abuse the second girl and “trash her life”.

“She wouldn’t have been in the court room, she wouldn’t have been in court at all,” she said. “I’m really angry, I’m not pleased with the police.”

However, a mistake was not made by the police: the caution being removed was a result of policy at the time. And even if the caution did remain on his record, no employer or charity working with children or vulnerable adults would have known.

A Dyfed-Powys Police spokesperson said: “Dyfed-Powys Police confirmed that a caution for sexual assault from 1996 would have been recorded on the PNC (police national computer) record of Timothy Chambers.

“National policy at that time was that cautions were automatically dropped from PNC records after five years. If the caution was the only record on PNC then the entire record for that individual would have been dropped. This means that by 2001 the caution and Mr Chambers’ PNC record in its entirety was dropped from the computer system.

“National policy on this changed on April 1, 2006, after the Soham murders. Since the change made in April 2006 nothing is removed from PNC for any offences.

“In addition to this, Criminal Record Bureau checks did not come into being until March 2002.”

The Soham Murders took place in 2002, when two 10-year-old girls left a barbecue in Soham, in Cambridgeshire to buy sweets, and were lured into the house of their school caretaker Ian Huntley.

Huntley had been suspected of a string of offences. However, his only conviction before the murders was for riding an uninsured and unlicensed motorcycle.