Urgent inquiries were under way by police last night to see if more than 500 of the serious offenders, including paedophiles, have managed to secure jobs working with children.

Last night John Reid, the Home Secretary, was forced to admit that he knew nothing about the latest fiasco, which led to the troubled Home Office in effect “sitting on” details of British citizens convicted of offences abroad. Six years of information, which should have been entered into the Police National Computer (PNC), has been left to gather dust at Mr Reid’s department.

Mr Reid said that he regarded the matter as “a very serious problem” and would be meeting police and officials tomorrow to discuss how it should be dealt with. “This is a very serious problem and I take it very seriously indeed. That’s why I’ve called in the police and the Criminal Records Bureau for an urgent meeting,” he said. “I want to establish the facts and satisfy myself that everything is being done to protect the public.”

It emerged yesterday that more than 27,000 paper records on British citizens who had committed crimes abroad were sent to the Home Office between 1999 and last year, including information on more than 500 serious offenders.

The controversy then degenerated into a row, with senior police officers accusing the department of issuing inaccurate information in an attempt to lessen the impact of the problem.

The cases included 25 British citizens convicted of rape in other European countries whose details were not entered into the PNC or the sex offenders register.

Other files included information about three British citizens convicted of attempted rape and a further 45 convicted of sexual abuse, including 29 on children. There were also foreign convictions for five murders, nine attempted murders, 13 manslaughters and 29 robberies.

Details of the latest Home Office blunder were disclosed by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) to MPs on the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee.

Acpo said in its written evidence: “The majority of these serious foreign convictions of UK nationals were not on the Police National Computer and we have no DNA, fingerprints or photographs.”

A team of police officers is now making checks with the Criminal Records Bureau to discover if any of the most dangerous 525 offenders have applied for jobs working with children or the sick and vulnerable.

The need to improve the quality of information exchanged about criminals was highlighted in 2003. Michel Fourniret, 63, was arrested by Belgian police for the murder of six French and one Belgian girl. He had previously been sentenced to seven years for rape and indecent assault on under-age children in France, but the Belgian authorities were unaware of his conviction.

In another case Francisco Montes, 55, was convicted of the murder in France of Caroline Dickinson, from Cornwall, in 2004. He had previously been arrested for sex offences in Germany and Spain.

Paul Kernaghan, Chief Constable of Hampshire, told the select committee that the Home Office’s processing system had been totally unacceptable.

“Until the Acpo criminal records office was created, someone could go to Germany, commit a sexual offence and serve a sentence — and this would not be known to any police officer when they came back to the UK. It would not be known to the courts in the UK if they re-offended. That is a totally unacceptable position.”

A new system only began in May 2006 when chief police officers inherited the 27,000 files on overseas convictions from the Home Office.

Chief police officers said that half of the 525 most serious offenders were now on the PNC, but a Home Office statement said that all of them had been logged.

Last night Sir David Normington, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, began a full inquiry into the blunder.

A Home Office spokeswoman said the backlog had not been made public earlier because to the “best of our knowledge” the matter had not been brought to the attention of Mr Reid or his ministers.

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