Andrew Norfolk, tenacious reporter who broke the story of the grooming gangs scandal

Yahoo

25-05-2025

Andrew Norfolk, who has died aged 60, was the dogged investigative journalist who braved accusations of racism and the hostility of officialdom to uncover the widespread existence of Asian grooming gangs in the north of England.
The first intimation of one of the most dismaying British public scandals of the century so far was a report by Norfolk that appeared on the front page of The Times on January 5 2011, under the headline: 'Revealed: conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs.'
He disclosed that for more than a decade child protection experts had been cataloguing repeated instances of groups of men, mostly of Pakistani origin, befriending and grooming vulnerable under-age girls, usually white, whom they met in the street.
'No research has been carried out into why such a high proportion of the offenders belong to one minority ethnicity,' Norfolk wrote, 'and with the exception of one town there is scant evidence of work being undertaken in British Pakistani communities to confront the problem.'
He quoted the view of DCI Alan Edwards of West Mercia Police that a 'damaging taboo' was preventing police forces, local authorities and charities from acknowledging the scale of the problem. As Edwards put it: 'To stop this type of crime you need to start talking about it, but everyone's been too scared to address the ethnicity factor. No one wants to stand up and say that Pakistani guys in some parts of the country are recruiting young white girls and passing them around their relatives for sex.'
The report provoked a national outcry and the rapid announcement by the Coalition government of an inquiry. It was one of the great scoops of the decade. And yet, for many years beforehand Norfolk had talked himself out of pursuing the story.
Shortly after being appointed North-East correspondent of The Times in 2003, he had reported on the concerns raised by Ann Cryer, the Labour MP for Keighley in West Yorkshire, about groups of Pakistani men hanging around outside schools and targeting teenage girls for sex. Although the parents of several girls complained that the police and social services were ignoring pleas to take action, Norfolk decided not to investigate in depth.
'Liberal angst kicked instinctively into top gear,' he recalled. 'If I'm honest, I didn't want the story to be true because it made me deeply uncomfortable… [It] was always going to be the far Right's fantasy story come true.'
Over the next half a dozen years, however, 'regular prodding of my conscience' came from reading frequent reports of gangs of men preying on girls aged between 11 and 15, using the same modus operandi and 'inevitably [with] Muslim names'.
He decided to investigate but received no co-operation from the police, or from the larger children's charities such as Barnardo's. Eventually two small organisations that worked with children put him in touch with people whose daughters had been groomed and forced to have sex with several older men.
His stories caused a sensation, and in 2012 he was promoted to chief investigative reporter. He continued to delve into the grooming scandal, focusing on Rotherham, where he found that one girl living in a children's home had been taken to Greater Manchester and raped by 50 men in one night, while a 13-year-old girl found naked in a flat with seven men had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly with no action taken against the men.
Norfolk had to hold his nerve when one trial collapsed and colleagues at The Times began to question the wisdom of pursuing the story. But in 2012 he produced evidence culled from confidential documents 'that laid bare a decade in which senior council officials and police officers knew exactly what was happening to hundreds of girls in the town, and often the names of the men committing the offences, yet invariably chose to look the other way'.
In 2014 he was happy to observe that there had been 'a steady transformation, for the better, in the stance adopted towards child sexual exploitation by police forces, local authorities, the Crown Prosecution Service and the judiciary'. The inquiry report published that year by Prof Alexis Jay, which identified more than 1,400 young victims in Rotherham, led to several police misconduct investigations and the resignation of the chief executive of Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council.
Norfolk always took care to point out that most grooming of young girls in Britain was carried out online by white men, but nevertheless endured a torrent of accusations of racism for focusing on Asian perpetrators. He regretted that, inevitably, aspects of his reports fuelled racist rhetoric from the far Right.
'There have been many days,' Norfolk once admitted, 'when I secretly longed for it all to come to an end. It was just too bleak, the details of the crimes too grotesque, too calculated to make one utterly despair of human nature.' He was reluctant to accept praise for his dedication. 'It was always the girls and their families who kept me going… They are the closest this tale will ever come to having heroes or heroines.'
Andrew Mark Norfolk was born in Canterbury on January 8 1965, the son of David Norfolk, a teacher and Methodist lay preacher, and his wife Olive, née Bellerby. The family later moved to Harrogate when David Norfolk was appointed headmaster of the Methodist school Ashfield College, where Andrew excelled academically and as a sportsman. He read English at Durham University and became a trainee at the Scarborough Evening News before joining the Yorkshire Post in 1995.
The most modest and mild-mannered of journalists, Norfolk only secured a job at The Times after his brother applied on his behalf, attaching copies of his outstanding reports into corruption at Doncaster Council. Norfolk loathed living in London, however, and after two years insisted on being transferred to Leeds in 2002.
Among other stories he investigated at The Times were allegations of abuse at more than 100 boarding schools, corruption at the trade union Unite and links between British banks and Islamist extremists. In 2014 he received the Orwell Prize and was named Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards. Latterly rheumatoid arthritis obliged him to walk with a stick, and he retired in 2024.
Earlier this year Norfolk criticised Elon Musk for claiming that the mainstream media had been silent on the grooming gang scandal: 'It just seems that Elon Musk, whose relationship with the truth seems so loose… clicks his fingers, shoots his mouth off and the whole British establishment responds. I find it surprising that man wields that much power.'
When Musk accused Sir Keir Starmer of complicity in a cover-up, Norfolk reiterated that it was Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, who had 'changed the rules to make more prosecutions possible. That happened and there was a huge increase in convictions.'
He also rejected recent calls for another inquiry into the scandal: 'These girls… are being exploited all over again. Now for politicians to jump on the bandwagon again when they've been silent for so many years just strikes me as a bit shameful.'
Andrew Norfolk was a dedicated smoker and lifelong Tottenham Hotspur fan with a tattoo of the club crest on his ankle. He is survived by his sister and two brothers.
Andrew Norfolk, born January 8 1965, died May 8 2025
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.