The undercover reporter's story

Panorama reporter Luke Mendham spent five months undercover in two bail hostels. He worked with sex offenders, murderers, drug addicts and prolific offenders. He was to be shocked by the gaping holes in a system designed to protect us.

I first applied for a job at a pair of bail hostels in Bristol last spring, following two brutal murders by residents in their care last year.

It was clear there must be some flaws within the system but I was not prepared for the scale of the problem.

The Brigstocke Road hostel deals with high-risk offenders, including a lot of paedophiles violent criminals and offenders with mental health problems.

The Ashley House hostel deals largely with drug users and prolific offenders. And while it doesn't tend to house as many dangerous individuals, many spend their days committing crime to pay for their habits. One staff member referred to the hostel as "a mini crime wave for the area".

Equipped with a secret camera, I started my first day at Brigstocke Road last May and quickly learned of the increasing numbers of high-risk offenders that are being taken on by the hostel.

Despite the high number of apparently dangerous criminals, due in part to the lack of prison places available, I was struck by the surprisingly civilised atmosphere. The staff, it seemed, were managing to keep the ship above water in difficult circumstances.

However, staff secretly admitted that outside of residents' curfew times - between 11pm and 6am - they had little idea what the residents got up to.

We decided the only way to find out was to watch them ourselves.

We opted to carry out surveillance on Frank Parker, a "lifer" who'd spent 39 years in prison for sexually assaulting and murdering a 10-year-old girl back in the 1960s.

He had been released last year into the hostel, which would act as a halfway house, keeping an eye on him and helping him ease back into normal society. He was released on 'life licence'. This imposed conditions on his behaviour designed to protect him from children. He was still considered a risk and, if he broke those conditions he could be sent back to prison.

He had a friendly and jovial manner with staff, but I was told he had recently come close to being recalled to prison.

He had spent several months working at a charity shop - a typical part of the rehabilitation process for offenders released after a long period in prison.

But just a couple of weeks before I arrived at the hostel, it emerged that the 61 year old had been taking photos of young women in the charity shop and in the surrounding area.

He maintained that he had done nothing wrong, but his cameras were confiscated and he lost his job. Then, just days later, it emerged that he had taken a 17-year-old girl up to his room at the hostel and taken semi-naked photos of her.

Hostel staff were aware that the girl was known to Frank as she was connected to his family, but this was still an astonishing breach of hostel rules, which ban residents from taking anyone up to their rooms, least of all teenage girls.

He was given a "red warning" and instructed to sign in at the hostel on an hourly basis, narrowly escaping a recall to prison.

We expected him to keep his head down. But our surveillance team were to witness him blatantly ignoring instructions from hostel staff to tow the line. And, perhaps more surprising and shocking, he appeared able to do this without any fear of being caught.

Within a few days, it became apparent that he had befriended some young mums and kids at flats near his hostel.

Our suspicion was heightened when, back at the hostel, I asked him what he'd been doing over the past few days. He made no mention of ever going to the flats, claiming that he had been exploring Bristol. When I asked him about friends, he denied having met anyone.

The surveillance team then witnessed him turning up at the flats and hanging around with the children alone.

We called the police. We told them who he was, where he was staying and what he had been doing.

That night I went in to work at the hostel fully expecting there to be some kind of hoohah involving Frank. But there was nothing.

There was no record in the hostel log book, no mention of it when I was given an update on residents' by another staff member. I had to conclude that the police had not told the hostel about what Frank had been up to. Surely, they needed to know.

Still, I expected to hear that Frank had at least been warned from going back to the flats by police.

But to our amazement, he went straight back there the next day - and then for three further days, hanging out with the kids.

We kept watching. Four days after the original call and just as we were about to call the police again, Frank stopped going to the flats. It appeared someone may have at last spoken to him.

Assuming that Frank would now tow the line, we decided to have a look at another offender.

Kevin Rodgers, a high-risk predatory paedophile, had been released from prison on licence after serving two years of a four-year sentence for sexually assaulting a series of children.

We chose him because the hostel had received a letter stating that Kevin had been looking in through the gate of a girls' school, about half a mile from the hostel.

As with the other residents, Kevin was very polite and civilised with hostel staff. But, again, on our first day watching him, we were to be shocked at what we saw.

Our surveillance team picked him up and followed him to Bristol's Broadmead shopping centre. At first we thought he had a Big Issue badge hanging from a band around his neck, but when the team got closer we realised it was a small digital camera.

Kevin would stand on the street looking around at shoppers and then wander over and secretly take pictures of them.

That same day he also spent a lot of time hanging out near public toilets. He was known to have targeted children around toilets before.

To our team, he seemed confident that he would not be caught - either by police or by those monitoring the CCTV cameras littered around the centre.

Prior to his conviction in 2002, Rodgers told police that, if he knew he could get away with it, there was nothing to stop him sexually assaulting children - and that his risk of offending sometimes went up to "eight out of ten".

By his own admission, he seemed likely to re-offend. Yet no-one was keeping an eye on him.

Just days later, his stay at the hostel was over and he moved into a flat in Wellington, Somerset. A month later, he was recalled to prison after being caught loitering in a swimming pool changing rooms.

Around this time, we decided to see what Frank was up to again.

The first day we picked him up, our surveillance discovered that he had started returning to the flats. Worse, he'd presented a puppy to the children living there and was taking photos of them.

We called the police again. This time Frank appeared to stop going back to the flats. But again no-one from the police appeared to inform the hostel or the probation service - the very people charged with his care.

At this stage I was already aghast at how disjointed the system seemed to be.

But it was still appalling when further revelations emerged, relating to the murder by a hostel resident last year.

Father-of-two Colin Winstone was stabbed to death by offender Davidson Charles, who had been previously convicted of a series of violent crimes. Drug addict Charles was jailed for life for the killing of Mr Winstone.

But, one evening at the start of a night shift, one of the hostel's most senior staff told me that the murder should have been prevented.

He said that the hostel had warned Charles' probation officer that he was offending again, prior to the murder. They believed he had targeted other taxi drivers and had beaten and stolen from his girlfriend.

This, hostel staff believed, was enough for the probation officer to recall Charles to prison.

But it was never done. Charles murdered Mr Winstone just weeks later.

While this was unravelling, I was also working at the Ashley House hostel, set in a smart residential area of Bristol.

This hostel was primarily used to house drug users and prolific offenders. Although many of the residents were considered a lower risk to the public than many at Brigstocke, the hostel itself was far rowdier.

Many of the residents were very likeable despite their drug addictions, but they would regularly get drunk and start "kicking off".

With so much testosterone and a women's annex in the hostel to help ignite it, the atmosphere on occasion could literally be crackling with tension.

It is not unusual for staff to find themselves splitting up fights or becoming the subject of verbal abuse. I escaped without being involved in a serious punch up, though it is something staff sometimes have to deal with.

On one occasion, I asked a resident to speak to a drugs worker only for him to start hollering abuse and slamming the iron he was holding down against an ironing board. As he was listed as a high-risk offender with previous convictions for violence, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous. Fortunately he stormed off and cooled down.

Many other residents at the Ashley House hostel have serious drug addictions and regularly commit crime in order to fund their habits.

One such offender was called Daniel Gill, who came from Kingswood, and had more than 100 offences to his name, including burglary, theft and assault.

He developed a name for himself within the hostel as something of a "blagger" and would always take whatever he could from any circumstance, whether it be extra fruit at breakfast time or extra valium tablets when it was time to hand over his medication.

He was chosen as another target for our surveillance team.

On one occasion he was filmed shoplifting and then heading straight to a second hand shop. On another he roped in a female resident to help him raise cash. She went off to solicit for sex by a roadside. After picking up a punter she returned with cash for Danny, who had been standing in a phone box with another man, seemingly scoring some drugs.

Many staff believe that hardened offenders like Danny should be separated from other drug-using residents, who want to give up, but can't, because there are so many drugs floating around the hostel.

The hostel is meant to be a drug free zone. But, because hostel staff are not allowed to search residents, they just carry their "gear" in their pockets. Staff said that searching them breaches their human rights.

It is just one more aspect of a public protection and crime prevention system which often appears disjointed and craving greater resources.

Having worked in the hostels for five months, it became clear to me that the system needs to be tightened up.

We the public are told that we are all being safeguarded by a public protection system called Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements, which, through partnerships between probation, police and other agencies, is a world leader in the field.

Yet, from the experience of our surveillance team, there appeared to be very little, if any, monitoring of high-risk and prolific offenders.

Hostel staff regularly spoke of their concerns - how they felt there should be a more focused drugs policy, more monitoring of offenders, more rehabilitation for those released from jail and more robust and joined-up public protection systems in place.

I found that staff were largely hard-working and thoughtful about the work they were doing.

But they are not given the resources or the training to do the job as well as they would like. Instead they are being left to deal with increasing numbers of high-risk offenders, many with mental health problems, serious drug problems and long histories of crime.