National inquiry into grooming gangs

The Home Secretary has now agreed to hold a national inquiry after the Government in January 2025 announced measures to address child sexual exploitation and abuse – the implementation of mandatory reporting legislation, making grooming an aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sexual offences and improved data collection on child sexual abuse – that however fell short of a full national statutory public inquiry.

The Government was in favour of local inquiries to identify past poor practice.

The Prime Minister has been criticised for saying that people who instead said they should go further and called for a national inquiry were “jumping on a bandwagon” and that this was a cause of “the far right”.

It is fair to say that politicians of both major parties face awkward questions about why a specific national inquiry into grooming gangs was not set up sooner, as the previous Conservative Government did not order one during their 14 years in office.

What has changed the Government’s mind is the findings of the rapid review published on Monday 16 June by Baroness Casey into grooming gangs and child sexual abuse.  This was set up in January to examine existing data and evidence on the nature, scale and profile of group-based child sexual abuse offending.  

*Reports say this audit has heavily criticised the data collection on the nature and scale of group-based child sexual abuse, including the ethnicity of perpetrators, which is said to be “shied away from” and not recorded in two-thirds of cases.  This is shocking.  The review says there is enough evidence from police data in three areas – Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire – to show over-representation amongst suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men.  The significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity has also been identified in local reviews and high-profile prosecutions across the country, most recently the conviction last week of 7 men found guilty of the most horrendous crimes in Rochdale.

Louise Casey has recommended that there should be both a national police operation to review cases of child exploitation not acted on and a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation in England and Wales.

Louise Casey has also made other important recommendations about tightening the law in England and Wales so that adults who have sex with a child under the age of 16 years old are always charged with rape and to review criminal convictions of victims of child sexual exploitation.

Clearly, we must “see children as children” and not as consenting participants in their sexual coercion.

Implementation of Sammy’s Law, which would give CSE survivors the right to have their criminal records reviewed, and crimes associated with their grooming removed, is long overdue.  

In January, police forces were given some additional resources to look again at grooming gang cases that were not previously progressed through the criminal justice system.  The Home Secretary has stated that hundreds of cases have been identified for formal review.  It is to be hoped that the new national police investigation led by the National Crime Agency will have the expertise and resources necessary now to bring perpetrators of these vile crimes who have so far escaped prosecution to justice.  Survivors have told the media this week that offenders are still living freely in their communities whilst they fear going out.  This is heartbreaking.  It is the perpetrators, not survivors, who should be serving life sentences.  Our towns and cities must be made safe.      

We know that reporting and cooperating with the police and criminal justice processes can be really challenging and traumatic for survivors of exploitation and abuse, particularly if they have previously had their cases dropped or not investigated.  It is vital that specialist ‘trauma-informed’ support is made available for the victims and survivors who are now being asked to re-tell and relive their experiences.

I have mixed feelings about a new national inquiry.  This is not because I have mixed feelings about holding institutions to account for past failures.  On the contrary, the institutions who should have protected children but failed to do so should be robustly investigated and their failures exposed.  This may bring more knowledge of what went wrong into the public domain.  

It is also important that survivors of grooming gangs are listened to.  They should not be denied the opportunity to tell the truth about how they were let down.

However, as Lord Norton of Louth, who chairs the cross-party House of Lords Committee on Statutory Inquiries, has said, public inquiries have become a reflexive response to a major scandal or disaster, often taking a long time and costing a great amount and coming up with recommendations – which however there is no obligation to implement.  Once an inquiry has reported, it ceases to exist and ministers are not obligated to act on its recommendations.  This has even been the case for the inquiry into the effectiveness of inquiries set up under the Inquiries Act 2005.

It has also, sadly, been the case for the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). Despite all the survivor testimony and trauma during its seven-year investigation, most of the 20 IICSA recommendations remain unimplemented; some of them like mandatory reporting legislation have been watered down and others like the recommendation for a national redress scheme have been dropped.  This includes a proposal for reform of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme so that applications for payments are not automatically rejected in circumstances where an applicant’s criminal convictions are likely to be linked to their sexual abuse as a child.  

The further select committee with which Lord Norton is involved is looking again at what can be done to improve the work of inquiries and that they ensure that lessons are both learned and acted upon.

Until this work has been done, and there is a requirement on the Government not just to set up a national inquiry into grooming gangs but also to see it through and act on the recommendations, then I am concerned that, despite today’s victory for the rights of those affected by child sexual exploitation, nothing may really change.