Three police forces in Britain are to be investigated over alleged failures to act on intelligence relating to indecent images of children.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) will investigate forces in Essex, North Yorkshire and North Wales in relation to intelligence received from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop).

It follows a delay by Essex Police in acting on an intelligence package from the National Crime Agency (NCA) in November 2013, which identified now-deceased teacher Martin Goldberg as a potential paedophile.

Goldberg, who worked at Thorpe Hall School, Southend, was found to have hundreds of images of pupils on his computer when he was discovered dead at his Essex home the day after police had called on him.

Essex Police later referred itself to the IPCC, which later wrote to chief constables of all police forces in England and Wales to ask whether their force received material from the so-called Project Spade intelligence from the NCA and if so to review the way they treated the information.

As a result, the police watchdog received referrals from North Yorkshire and North Wales Police.

IPCC deputy chairman Sarah Green said: "There is rightly considerable public concern about how police forces deal with sexual offences involving children.

"The IPCC takes this issue seriously and proactively contacted all forces and asked them to review their handling of intelligence to determine the scale of any issues.

"Our investigations will examine carefully how intelligence from Ceop was dealt with by these three forces."

The IPCC has also received a referral from the NCA relating to a failure to send out Project Spade intelligence received in July 2012 to UK police forces until November 2013.

Toronto Police in Canada provided the information to Ceop, which included customer details of purchasers of indecent DVDs and videos.