Closing the loophole: what the Crime and Policing Act 2026 means for name changes under MAPPA
- Rik
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
For years, one of the more uncomfortable gaps in the UK's public protection system was how easy it was for a registered sex offender to simply become someone else on paper. Anyone in England and Wales is free to change their name at will, by deed poll or statutory declaration, provided it isn't for a fraudulent purpose.
Registered sex offenders, the largest cohort managed under Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) were subject to one safeguard on top of that general freedom: a duty under Part 2 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 to tell the police within three days of adopting a new name. Failing to do so was a criminal offence, but the notification came after the fact, once the new identity already existed.
The Safeguarding Alliance and campaigners including Sarah Champion MP argued this was too little, too late. Their research found that between 2019 and 2021, more than 700 registered sex offenders went missing from police records around a name change, against roughly 1,500 who did comply. A new name meant a clean Disclosure and Barring Service check, and in some cases a route back into work with children or vulnerable adults. A 2020 parliamentary petition to revoke offenders' right to change their name by deed poll gathered over 37,000 signatures, and a Commons debate followed in March 2023. The government's position throughout was that the underlying right to change a name couldn't easily be removed, but that the process around it could be tightened.
The Crime and Policing Act 2026 (See here), which received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026, is where that tightening finally lands in statute. For registered sex offenders — MAPPA's category 1 cohort, numbering 70,052 in the community as of March 2024 — the Act makes two substantive changes.
First, the three-day retrospective notification is replaced with a seven-day advance one. An offender must now tell the police before they start using a new name, and if the change is being made by deed poll, they must notify the police at least seven days before they even submit the application. That shifts the moment of police awareness from after the identity change has already taken effect to before it begins, giving officers a window to assess risk while there is still something to intervene in.
Second, and more significantly, the Act gives police a new power to serve a notice on a registered offender requiring them to seek explicit police approval before changing their name on a UK passport, driving licence, or immigration document. Where police are satisfied that refusal is necessary to protect the public from sexual harm, they can simply say no. There are exemptions — a name change on marriage, for instance, is recognised as often legitimate and even helpful to rehabilitation — but police retain discretion to refuse even an exempted change if they judge the risk high enough.
Two things are worth flagging for anyone working in offender management or employability services. One, these provisions are specific to registered sex offenders under Part 2 of the 2003 Act; nothing in the public evidence suggests an equivalent statutory restriction has been introduced for other MAPPA categories, such as violent offenders managed under category 2 or 3, whose freedom to change their name by deed poll remains, as far as the record shows, unaltered. Two, the change is about oversight and timing, not prohibition, offenders aren't barred from changing their name, but the police now have earlier visibility and, for identity documents, a veto where public protection requires it.
The reform is popularly known as "Della's Law," after abuse survivor Della Wright, whose campaigning helped keep the issue on the parliamentary agenda from the original 2020 petition through to Royal Assent in 2026.
