Scott Mills is preparing to sue the after he was sacked from its Radio 2 breakfast show over a historic police probe into sexual assault allegations involving an underage boy. The 53-year-old presenter has enlisted leading lawyers as he builds a legal case and is understood to be arguing that he had already told executives the full details of the investigation years ago.
Mills was removed from the line-up at the end of March, ending his run on the UK’s most popular breakfast show. Sources close to him say he will contend that the issues had already been fully raised with Radio 1 management at the time, including the accuser’s age, and that the corporation’s decision to dismiss him came after the same allegations had already been disclosed internally.
The dispute now centres on when the says it learned what it needed to know. The corporation has said Mills was sacked after new information came to light, while his camp says the matter had long been handled inside the organisation. Mills is understood to have told executives about the investigation when it first emerged, years before the dismissal, in a case that later became public only after fresh reporting around the allegations.
The Metropolitan Police launched its investigation in 2016 into allegations of serious sexual offences said to have taken place between 1997 and 2000. The claims involved a teenage boy under 16, and the probe was later dropped because there was not enough evidence to proceed. After his sacking, Mills released a statement through his lawyers saying he had been the subject of rumour and speculation since he was fired and that he had co-operated fully with the police investigation.
The fallout from the allegations has spread beyond the. Mills was removed from the line-up of the Ibiza Symphonica summer concert, Channel 4 said it would not show the final episode of The Great Celebrity Bake Off For Stand Up To Cancer because of the allegations against him, and he stepped back from his role as an ambassador for MS Society UK. Neuroblastoma UK also decided to part ways with him, ending a patronage that began in 2021, and he has been dropped as host of the ’s new Race Across The World spin-off podcast.
The legal battle now gives Mills a direct path to challenge the ’s account of why he was dismissed, and it turns on a narrow but crucial question: whether the corporation acted on genuinely new information, or whether it removed a presenter after revisiting a case he says had already been fully disclosed.
