To be clear -- the police exonerating him took three years ("5 April 2014 he received a letter from Hertfordshire constabulary"), which is rather a long ordeal, especially because he had no idea why he was targeted until then.
The "three weeks" just refers to how long it took for the police's forensics people to search his laptop and find nothing. After those three weeks the police was like "oh we can't find proof of those illegal images on your laptop, welp, gotta let you go", not "we typoed an IP address and kicked down the wrong door, you are completely innocent and utterly unconnected to this".
But, it wasn't. People were still suspicious - and in his working with kids it doesn't make sense to "take a risk" on an allegedly exonerated pedophile.
What should happen and what did happen as a result of his three weeks of suspicion was starkly different. Certainly we don't need to blame anything or anyone in particular to understand how awful something like false charges can be regardless of how awful they ought to be.
> Three weeks are not such a long ordeal, especially when you know from the start it's all a mistake.
He didn't know it was three weeks at the time, he didn't know if he would be able to exonerate himself or if he was being framed or whatever - it's not like he's just sleeping it off when law enforcement already got one thing wrong enough to falsely arrest.
England has a "Disclosure and Barring Service". People who work with children and vulnerable people will apply for a DBS. It will return information about arrests and convictions. Some people need an enhanced DBS, and that will sometimes return police intel.
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/disclosure-and-b...
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/disclosure-and-b...
This is likely to affect his employment for some jobs until it got fixed.
He is no longer the calm, re-assuring, blissfully ignorant individual he once was.
He should probably be re-evaluated for current aptitude and skills, receive refining education towards a promising related career field and live a reborn life. I don't know, does the UK actually do the right thing (unlike the US)?