North Wales Police charged in three of five child exploitation investigations, and in 38 of 432 obscene publications ones

North Wales Police announced on 4 September that its online child abuse team was closing cases with a positive outcome at double the national rate. The figure holds. It comes from five cases. In the year to March 2026 the force closed five investigations of abuse of children through sexual exploitation, the Home Office category the claim rests on, and three ended with a suspect charged or summonsed. Three out of five is the 60 per cent. Cover reproduced that figure, and the 27.9 per cent England and Wales average, from the Home Office's own outcomes open data for offence code 71. Positive outcome is the force's phrase, not the Home Office's, which publishes numbered outcome codes and never uses the term. Cover counted as positive the basket the force itself sets out: charges, summonses, postal requisitions, cautions, penalty notices, warnings and community or restorative resolutions, which are Home Office outcome codes 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8. No code in that basket is a conviction.

What a base of five does

One case moves a rate built on five by 20 percentage points. In 2024/25 North Wales Police closed exactly five of the same investigations and charged nobody, a rate of zero. The England and Wales rate that year was 39.6 per cent and has fallen to 27.9 since, so the bar the force cleared this year is lower than the one it missed last year. The count is published unsuppressed, so five is real. But North Wales Police recorded only four offences in this category across the whole of 2025/26. The five closed investigations are not a sample of a larger caseload; the five are close to the entire category, and the five outnumber the offences the force recorded in the period because an investigation can close in a later year than the offence was logged.

The wider force figures

Code 71 is a small corner of the force's sexual offences work, and no published figure says how much of it this particular team handles. Indecent images sit under obscene publications, Home Office code 86, and North Wales Police closed 432 of those investigations in 2025/26. Forty-nine reached a positive outcome, 11.3 per cent against 16.6 per cent for England and Wales, and on charges alone the gap is wider, 38 of the 432, 8.8 per cent, against 14.8. On sexual grooming, code 88A, the force reached a positive outcome in 16 of 107, 15.0 per cent against 34.3 nationally. Each row in the panel above sets North Wales Police against England and Wales on the same offence and the same basis. The force is double the national rate on the one the release chose, above it on sexual activity involving a child under 16, at 19.2 per cent against 14.3, and below it on the rest. Ranked against every force with data on code 71, North Wales Police is fourth of 42 on the closed-investigation basis. Dorset is 80 per cent from four closed investigations, North Yorkshire 75 per cent from four, Essex 62.9 per cent from 35, and Cleveland is also three of five. In Wales, Gwent is 50 per cent from eight, South Wales 27.3 per cent from 11 and Dyfed-Powys 25 per cent from four. Every force above North Wales except Essex is working from a base in single figures.

What the inspectors found

The independent verdict on those teams is harder reading. HMICFRS, the police inspectorate, graded North Wales Police “requires improvement” at investigating crime and at protecting vulnerable people in its PEEL assessment for 2023 to 2025, published on 5 December 2024. Investigators in child protection and serious sexual offences teams told inspectors that “a lack of staff, officers and supervisors resulted in unmanageable workloads”. Inspectors were also told that “not all officers were fully trained to carry out child protection investigations”. The force says it plans to increase the number of officers in its child protection teams, without saying how many or by when.

What the force has not published

Detective Inspector Sofiah Valentine said: “The recent figures demonstrate the great work being done to bring perpetrators of online child abuse to justice and protect children from harm.” The release does not state the period the rate covers, the base behind it, or the source of the national average, and it defines a positive outcome as action following an arrest. Arrests are a different denominator from closed investigations, and the outcomes data does not publish it. If the team did count against arrests, then Cover's reconstruction landing on both of the force's figures at once is a coincidence. That is the less likely reading. Cover has not put the question to North Wales Police, and this piece therefore cannot say which basis the team used. No team size, caseload or arrest count appears on the force's site or the Police and Crime Commissioner's.

The release also states a 26,000 per cent rise in AI generated child sexual abuse material in 2025, more broadly than its source does: the Internet Watch Foundation's figure counts AI generated videos, 3,443 in 2025 against 13 the year before, a rise of 26,385 per cent. Its wider measure of realistic AI generated imagery moved from 193 reports to 491.

Corrected and expanded at 00:25 on Sunday 6 September. An earlier version of this piece said the 60 per cent the force published was the same figure Cover had reconstructed from Home Office data. The force defines its rate against arrests, which the outcomes data does not publish, so the two may not be the same measure; that caveat is now in the piece. The earlier version also headed a section “the rest of the team's year” and set the indecent image and grooming figures against the online child abuse team's caseload. No published figure attributes those offences to that team, so both categories are now given as force-wide figures. The headline has been changed because “child sexual exploitation” described a wider field than the single Home Office offence code the 60 per cent covers. Corrected again at 09:00 on Sunday 6 September, after a review desk read. The piece said a positive outcome was the Home Office's term; it is the force's own, and the Home Office publishes numbered outcome codes instead. The headline and the standfirst also called all 432 obscene publications investigations indecent image cases, and described that category as the online child abuse team's, which is the attribution the correction above withdrew.