Yvette Cooper declares there WILL be a national inquiry into grooming gangs as she releases 'damning' review into failings showing institutions 'avoided' topic of race
Yvette Cooper declared there will be a national inquiry into grooming gangs today as she published a 'damning' report into failures.
The Home Secretary said that those who had suffered 'despicable crimes' had been 'let down' by the authorities.
She told the House of Commons that Baroness Casey had been asked to conduct a 'no holds barred' review.
She said the Whitehall troubleshooter had identified 'deep-rooted failure to treat children as children', 'denial' and 'fragmentation'.
The report said perpetrators of Asian heritage were 'overrepresented' in cases, suggesting institutions had 'avoided the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist'.
Ms Cooper also said there was a 'continued failure to gather proper robust national data'. A national inquiry will oversee local investigations, she said.
She told MPs that all adults who engage in penetrative sex will under-16s would now face the most serious charges of rape.
Ms Cooper has already declared that Britain's version of the FBI will lead 'a major nationwide operation to track down more perpetrators'.
The National Crime Agency investigation has been billed as 'helping to put an end to the culture of denial in local services and authorities about the prevalence of this crime'.
The statement came after Keir Starmer 's made an humiliating U-turn over the weekend.
The conclusions sparked a dramatic volte face from the PM over the weekend. He previously suggested those calling for a national probe into the rape and sexual abuse of thousands of girls by gangs of mainly Pakistani-heritage men were 'jumping on the bandwagon' of the 'far-Right'.
However, a statutory national inquiry has now been ordered, with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper due to give details in a Commons statement later.
Downing Street stood by the premier's 'bandwagon' jibe today, arguing he was pointing out hypocrisy by Tories who had failed to tackle the issue while in power.
A review by Whitehall troubleshooter Baroness Casey is expected to conclude that years of warnings about abuse of white girls were 'institutionally ignored for fear of racism'
Ms Cooper said: 'More than 800 grooming gang cases have already been identified by police after I asked them to look again at cases which had closed too early.
'Now we are asking the National Crime Agency to lead a major nationwide operation to track down more perpetrators and bring them to justice.'
Ministers are said to be concerned that Lady Casey's findings could trigger civil unrest in parts of the country unless they are seen to be acting decisively.
But it has emerged that Sir Keir's 'national' inquiry could focus on attacks in as few as five communities.
Campaigners believe grooming gangs have been and remain active in as many as 50 towns and cities.
But Whitehall sources said the new inquiry is likely to merely act as an 'umbrella' for five local investigations that were already planned.
One source said limiting the inquiry would prevent it getting bogged down, adding: 'We don't want another seven-year inquiry,' a reference to the Jay inquiry into child sexual abuse.
Although it will have vital powers to compel public bodies such as councils and the police to give evidence, critics warned that ministers must not restrict its scope.
In January, the PM hit out at politicians 'calling for inquiries because they want to jump on the bandwagon of the far-Right'.
But speaking to reporters en route to the G7 summit in Canada over the weekend, Sir Keir said: 'Her position when she started the audit was that there was not a real need for a national inquiry over and above what was going on.
'She has looked at the material she has looked at and she has come to the view that there should be a national inquiry on the basis of what she has seen.
'I have read every single word of her report and I am going to accept her recommendation. That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she has put in her audit.
'I asked her to do that job to double-check on this; she has done that job for me and having read her report, I respect her in any event. I shall now implement her recommendations.'
Asked when it would start work, the PM replied: 'It will be statutory under the Inquiries Act. That will take a bit of time to sort out exactly how that works and we will set that out in an orderly way.'
He insisted that he had never ruled out a national inquiry although he previously wanted to focus on implementing recommendations made in earlier reports.
'From the start I have always said that we should implement the recommendations we have got because we have got many other recommendations. I think there are 200 when you take all of the reviews that have gone on at every level and we have got to get on with implementing them.
'I have never said we should not look again at any issue. I have wanted to be assured that on the question of any inquiry. That's why I asked Louise Casey who I hugely respect to do an audit.'
Chancellor Rachel Reeves insisted yesterday that the focus should be on victims rather than apologising to 'hurt feelings' of other politicians.
Robbie Moore, Tory MP for Keighley and Ilkley who wants an inquiry into grooming in West Yorkshire, was among those warning the terms must be right
A No10 spokesman said today: The prime minister's comments about bandwagons were specifically about ministers from the previous government who sat in office for years and did nothing to tackle this scandal. As the prime minister has said, we will not make the same mistake.
'The point the PM has made is that those spreading lies and misinformation were not doing so in the interest of victims. And those cheerleading for Tommy Robinson, who was almost who was jailed for almost collapsing a grooming case, are not interested in justice.'
The Labour MP for Rotherham said she was initially reluctant about another 'grooming gangs' inquiry but supported it after listening to the public.
Sarah Champion told BBC Radio 4's Today Programme that the 20 recommendations from the previous inquiry 'sat in a drawer for a while' but were now starting to be used.
She said: 'The thought of having another filled me with horror, and I was reluctant, but when I realised the overwhelming public concern, there's a real sense justice has not been handed out fairly and there has been a cover-up and intense frustration that there are still victims and survivors who haven't received justice.
'I have an intense frustration that not the frontline staff but further up the management chain there were people who were actively blocking reports, people who I think if not held to a criminal standard should be held to a professional standard for their negligence in protecting those children.
'I saw people that would have faced the most criticism have left, took early retirement, changed to a different job and some are having very successful careers, and that's an intense frustration when because of their negligence they have continued to let children be exposed and exploited.'
She said the biggest failing was that 'no-one has joined the dots up' when it came to grooming gangs of a Pakistani heritage.
She said: 'Are there any links between those different groups and gangs? Personally, I think it's highly likely that there will be.'
Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and journalist, told Times Radio: 'I think that ministers owe an apology to all of the people who they essentially said were talking rubbish, to all the people who to whom they said you haven't actually bothered to read the Jay Report and you don't know actually what's going on and to all of the people of whom it was suggested their interest and concern about this was motivated in some way by racial distaste or prejudice.'
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: 'The public deserves the truth in full, and without compromise and those who covered this up should be investigated for misconduct in public office.'
Robbie Moore, Tory MP for Keighley and Ilkley who wants an inquiry into grooming in West Yorkshire, said: 'If this inquiry is to deliver real justice, it must go much further than simply rebranding the five local inquiries already announced by Labour.
'In my view, this must truly be a people's inquiry – with investigations in the 50 towns and cities we know have been affected and new accountability mechanisms that can bring about criminal convictions.'
Reform leader Nigel Farage said the inquiry had to be 'done correctly'. He added: 'This cannot be a whitewash. It's time for victims to receive the justice they deserve and for perpetrators to face the full force of the law.'
Oldham grooming gang survivor Samantha Walker-Roberts said Sir Keir had only ordered an inquiry because he was 'backed into a corner'. She told Times Radio that the PM still does not have survivors' 'best interests at heart'.
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The Guardian
18 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Grooming gangs in UK thrived in ‘culture of ignorance', Casey report says
A culture of 'blindness, ignorance and prejudice' led to repeated failures over decades to properly investigate cases in which children were abused by grooming gangs, a report has said. As the government announced a public inquiry into the scandal, Louise Casey said for too long the authorities had shied away from the ethnicity of the people involved, adding it was 'not racist to examine the ethnicity of the offenders'. Lady Casey said she found evidence of 'over-representation' of Asian and Pakistani heritage men among suspects in local data – collected in Greater Manchester, West and South Yorkshire – and criticised a continued failure to gather robust data at a national level. The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, confirmed the government would accept all 12 recommendations of Casey's rapid review, including setting up a statutory inquiry into institutional failures. This marked a significant reversal after months of pressure on Labour to act. 'While much more robust national data is needed, we cannot and must not shy away from these findings, because, as Baroness Casey says, ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities,' Cooper said. The number of cold cases to be reviewed again over child sexual abuse by grooming gangs is expected to rise to more than 1,000 in the coming weeks, she told the Commons. Adult abusers targeted children, mainly girls, as young as 10, some of whom were in care, had physical or mental disabilities, or who had already suffered neglect or abuse. According to Casey, the ethnicity of grooming gangs has been 'shied away from' by authorities, allowing the continued abuse of hundreds of vulnerable girls, many of whom are now demanding justice. Casey said there should be 'a vigorous approach to righting the wrongs of the past' and state agencies should be held to account for any part they played in allowing these crimes to go undetected and unpunished. 'Blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions, all play a part in a collective failure to properly deter and prosecute offenders or to protect children from harm,' she said. In the report, Casey said: 'We as a society owe these women a debt. They should never have been allowed to have suffered the appalling abuse and violence they went through as children.' On the question of ethnicity, it said: 'We found that the ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data.' However, it added that at a local level for three police forces – Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire – there was enough evidence to show a 'disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation'. Asked if she was worried recording the data could lead to civil unrest, the peer told the Guardian at a press conference: 'So let's put it the other way around. If for a minute you had another report that ducked the issue, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think they're not going to use that as well?' She added: 'If good people don't grip difficult issues, in my experience bad people do.' Casey also looked at about a dozen live investigations and found that 'a significant proportion appear to involve suspects who are non-UK nationals', some of whom were claiming asylum in the UK. Casey's recommendations, which have been accepted in full, call for: Five existing local inquiries into grooming gangs to be coordinated by an independent commission which has full statutory inquiry powers. The collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases to be made mandatory. The law to be tightened to ensure there is no exception to those who sexually penetrate a child under 16 being charged with rape. Casey said she believed the public would be horrified to realise this was not the case already. Research into the drivers for group-based child sexual exploitation, including the role of social media, cultural factors and group dynamics. Every local police force in England and Wales to review records to identify cases of child sexual exploitation that have not been acted upon, including a review of cases that have been reported but which have not resulted in prosecutions over the last 10 years. Convictions of the young victims, many of whom say they still face appalling discrimination, should be quashed. Casey cited police figures from the 1990s which found almost 4,000 police cautions were given to children aged between 10 and 18 for offences relating to prostitution. It took until 2015 for the term 'child prostitution' to be dropped and replaced with the term 'child sexual exploitation', when the legislation was changed in the Serious Crime Act. She said that victims had regularly been retraumatised over the years from the shame of their convictions and the anger and at not being believed or living alongside their perpetrators. 'Sometimes they have criminal convictions for actions they took while under coercion,' Casey said. 'They have to live with fear and the constant shadow over them of an injustice which has never been righted – the shame of not being believed.' The report detailed how 'group-based child sexual exploitation' is a 'sanitised' way of talking about multiple sexual assaults against children by multiple men, including beatings and gang rapes. Reacting to the report, the children's commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, said that girls were failed in this scandal 'a source of national shame'. 'This inquiry must be a wake-up call for how we respond to vulnerable children, especially violence against girls,' she said. 'We cannot be more afraid of causing offence than we are of speaking out to protect children from exploitation and corruption.' The Home Office said a nationwide policing operation to bring grooming gang members to justice will be led by the National Crime Agency (NCA). Police have reopened more than 800 cases of child sexual abuse since the home secretary asked them to review cases in January.
Sky News
18 minutes ago
- Sky News
Grooming gangs report author reveals how she found word 'Pakistani' tippexed out of file
Ignoring the ethnicity of grooming gang perpetrators gives racists "more ammunition", the author of a new report has said. Baroness Louise Casey told Sky News' Politics with Sophy Ridge there was a particular issue with some British Asian men that was "abundantly clear" in data analysed from three police forces; West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester; which showed a "disproportionately" in child sexual exploitation. But she added: "Just to give some sort of balance, in Greater Manchester I asked for data on child sexual exploitation that took me to Asian heritage. I asked for data on child abuse and that took me to the general population, which is largely white." Baroness Casey said "if we just establish the facts, then you can take the pain out of this". "I think you've got sort of do-gooders that don't really want this to be found because, you know, 'Oh, God, then all the racists are going to be more racist'," she added. "Well, actually, people that are racist are going to use this anyway. All you're doing with the hate mongers and the racists is giving them more ammunition." Asked if people were worried about being seen as racist, the cross-bench peer said she came across direct examples of this in Rotherham - one of the towns at the centre of the grooming gangs scandal. "I was following through on a children's file in archive and found the word 'Pakistani' tippexed out," Baroness Casey said. "I thought whoever did that inadvertently was giving ammunition to the English Defence League that were every week, in and out, campaigning and doing their stuff in that town. "I think the problem is that people are worried about being called racist.... if good people don't grasp difficult things, bad people will, and that's why we have to do it as a society." 4:18 The government has announced there will be a full statutory inquiry into grooming gangs, as recommended by Baroness Casey's report. The government has also accepted her recommendations to introduce compulsory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in grooming cases, and for a review of police records to launch new criminal investigations into historic child sexual exploitation cases. Baroness Casey was asked to produce an audit of sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs in England and Wales, looking specifically at the issue of ethnicity and the cultural and social drivers for this type of offending. This had never before been done despite multiple local reviews into child sexual exploitation and a seven-year national inquiry into child abuse more generally, known as the Jay Review, which concluded in 2022. The government had previously resisted calls for an inquiry into grooming gangs, after a row with tech billionaire Elon Musk brought the issue back into the spotlight in January, saying it would implement the recommendations of the Jay Review that the Tories didn't. However it changed its position following Baroness Casey's findings. She found that flawed data has been used repeatedly to dismiss claims about "Asian grooming gangs". Having examined local data in three police force areas, she found "disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds" are among suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as a "significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity" who have been identified in local reviews and child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country. She said all of this warranted further examination, insisting to Sophy Ridge that the decision was not political. Baroness Casey has also called for a tightening of the laws around the age of consent so that any penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 is classified as rape, which the government has also accepted. She told Sophy Ridge that some perpetrators waited until their victims turned 13 as then it is "much harder to prosecute for rape". She said: "I think we have to be really clear in society that children are children and I don't see the difference between, you know, a four-year-old and a 14-year-old. If somebody is doing to them... what I talk about in my report, it's rape and we need to call it for what it is."
Telegraph
20 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Asylum seekers behind new grooming gang cases
Asylum seekers and foreign nationals are involved in a 'significant proportion' of live police investigations into child sex grooming gangs, an official report has warned. On Monday, the Government released a report by Baroness Casey which was ordered after renewed outrage over the scandal at the start of this year. In her 200-page audit, the peer accused officials of being in 'denial' about the scale of the problem and said that lessons had not been learnt from crimes committed in Rotherham a decade ago. It found that police and council leaders covered up the scale of Asian grooming gangs since concerns were first raised in 2009 because they feared being branded racist. Ahead of the release of the report, Sir Keir Starmer was forced to announce a national inquiry into the scandal in an embarrassing policy reversal. He has also ordered the National Crime Agency to carry out a nationwide investigation. Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about Asian or Pakistani suspects grooming young white girls, Lady Casey's review found police, local authorities and other agencies 'consistently failed' to fully acknowledge the fact or collect data so that the theory could be tested. She also warned that when she had reviewed about a dozen live police cases, 'a significant proportion of these cases appear to involve suspects who are non-UK nationals and/or who are claiming asylum in the UK'. Neither the Office for National Statistics nor the Ministry of Justice records data on the number of crimes committed by asylum seekers or foreign nationals. On Monday night, the Conservatives warned that the involvement of asylum seekers in grooming gangs must be taken seriously. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: 'I am deeply troubled to read that a significant proportion of these cases involve non-UK nationals and asylum seekers. 'This underlines the importance of securing our borders, which the Government has completely failed to do. I also call on the Government to prevent perpetrators from using human rights laws – not just asylum laws – to avoid deportation.' A record 84,200 applications for asylum were made in the UK in 2024. At the end of May, more than 14,600 migrants had crossed the Channel in small boats – up more than 30 per cent on the same point last year and the highest numbers for the first five months of a year since small boats started crossing in 2018. Unveiling the Casey report to the House of Commons, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, said any asylum seekers found guilty of grooming children or committing sexual offences would have their applications rejected. The Home Secretary said she would accept Lady Casey's recommendations in full, including the mandatory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sex abuse and criminal exploitation cases, as well as improvements to the ethnicity data collected for victims. She also said sorry for two decades of failure. Announcing the full national inquiry, she said: 'Those vile perpetrators who have grown used to the authorities looking the other way must have no place to hide.' The about-turn on a national inquiry is an embarrassment to Sir Keir, who in January accused those demanding one of jumping on a 'far-Right bandwagon'. The inquiry will last about three years, although this is much shorter than other probes such as that into Covid lockdowns. It comes 10 years after Lady Casey wrote a damning report into the culture of denial at Rotherham, South Yorkshire, where at least 1,400 children were sexually abused by grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013. In her latest audit, she accused public bodies of having used flawed data to dismiss claims about Asian grooming gangs as 'sensationalised, biased or untrue'. 'Instead of examination, we have seen obfuscation,' she wrote. 'In a vacuum, incomplete and unreliable data is used to suit the ends of those presenting it. 'The system claims there is an overwhelming problem with white perpetrators when that can't be proved.' Lady Casey also referred to 'examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tension'. 'Flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about 'Asian grooming gangs' as sensationalised, biased or untrue,' she said. 'This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities.' Lady Casey found that information on the ethnicity of abusers was not recorded in two thirds of cases. But her report contained local data from three forces which showed 'clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men'. Ms Cooper told the Commons that 800 cold cases would be investigated, a number she expected to rise to 1,000. 'Perpetrators of these vile crimes should be behind bars and paying the price of what they have done,' she said. The Home Secretary said the report found a 'deep-rooted failure to treat children as children', adding: 'A continued failure to protect teenage girls from rape, from exploitation and serious violence, and from the scars that last a lifetime. '[Lady Casey] finds … too much reliance on flawed data, too much denial, too little justice, too many criminals getting off, too many victims being let down.' Ms Cooper said the report found children as young as 10 and those with learning difficulties were singled out for grooming. 'Perpetrators [were] walking free because no one joined up the dots or because the law protected them instead of the victims that they had exploited,' she added. 'Blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions all played a part in this collective failure.' The Home Secretary pledged to ensure that 'those who engaged in cover-ups' should be prosecuted. She also delivered an apology to the victims. 'To the victims and survivors of child exploitation and grooming gangs, on behalf of this and past governments and the many public authorities who have left you down, I want to reiterate an unequivocal apology for the unimaginable pain that you have suffered and the failure of our country's institutions for decades to prevent that harm and keep you safe,' she said. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said: 'The Prime Minister's handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. After months of pressure, the Prime Minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs.'
