I will come to that. First, I make the point that I have the report in my hands; it is an inch thick, printed double-sided and it is nearly 200 pages. That is the specific inquiry into organised networks. Its contents are horrific, and I hope that by the end of my contribution, we will cease to hear the shadow Minister referring to the fact that it “barely touches” on grooming gangs.
For clarity, organised networks that conduct child sexual exploitation, as anyone who has carried out work in child protection will know, are grooming gangs. Organised networks are defined in this report as
“two or more individuals…who are known to (or associated with) one another”.
Section C.3 of the report sets out carefully why that definition was used. In comparison, new clause 15 seeks to define grooming gangs as a group of at least three adult males. As we saw in the convictions of women involved in grooming gangs in Rotherham, Newcastle and elsewhere, involvement in grooming gangs is not limited to men. Sadly, several of the cases mentioned in the investigation into grooming gangs make it clear that they are not always adults, as older children and teenagers can also be involved in grooming.
A further justification for another inquiry, as we heard from the shadow Minister, was that the previous inquiry covered just half a dozen places where grooming gangs have operated—namely, the areas covered by Durham county council, the City and County of Swansea council, Warwickshire county council, St Helens council in Merseyside, the London borough of Tower Hamlets and Bristol city council. The shadow Minister knows, I assume, that that was a deliberate sampling of local authorities from across England and Wales, and they were selected not because grooming gangs operated there—I do not think that was necessarily even known at the time of selection—but to consider a range of features including size, demography, geography and social characteristics. It was to illustrate different policies, practices and performance. It was a deliberate choice not to look again at areas like Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxford, which had already been the subject of independent investigation. Sampling, and looking at particular case studies like this, is very common and good practice in public inquiries. The fact that there were cases of child sexual exploitation by gangs in all six of the case study areas clearly indicated how common and pervasive this disgusting crime is.
On Second Reading, the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), implied that there was new information that child sexual exploitation takes place in many areas. He said:
“We now believe that as many as 50 towns could have been affected”.—[Official Report, 16 January 2025; Vol. 760, c. 564.]
But as the previous specific inquiry made clear three years ago, on page 4, when it comes to grooming gangs:
“Any denial of the scale of child sexual exploitation—either at national level or locally in England and Wales—must be challenged.”
In looking at whether new clause 15 is a rerun of questions IICSA already considered in the previous specific inquiry into grooming gangs, it is helpful to cross-refer the contents of new clause 15 with the scope of the previous investigations into grooming gangs, which is set out on page 148 of this report. New clause 15(2)(a) seeks an inquiry into grooming gangs to
“identify common patterns of behaviour and offending”.
But the scope of the previous grooming gangs inquiry states that it will investigate “the nature” of sexual exploitation by grooming gangs.
New clause 15(2)(b) and (c) seek another inquiry to look at the
“type, extent and volume of crimes”
and “the number of victims”. The specific inquiry looked at the “extent” of sexual exploitation.
New clause 15(2)(e) seeks a new inquiry to identify failings by
“(i) police,
(ii) local authorities,
(iii) prosecutors,
(iv) charities,
(v) political parties,
(vi) local…government,
(vii) healthcare providers…or
(viii) other agencies or bodies”.
But the grooming gangs inquiry investigated and considered the institutional responses to the sexual exploitation of children, and that specific inquiry also examined the extent to which
“children who were subjected to child sexual exploitation were known to local authorities and other public authorities such as law enforcement agencies, schools and/or the NHS”.
It also examined the extent to which
“relevant public authorities…effectively identified the risk of child sexual exploitation in communities and took action to prevent it”.
It examined the extent to which
“the response of the constituent parts of the criminal justice system was appropriate in cases of child sexual exploitation”.
The inquiry into grooming gangs heard from complainants, academics, local authorities, police officers, voluntary sector representatives, Government officials and representatives from victim support and campaign groups—a list that looks very similar to that set out at new clause 15(2)(e).
New clause 15(2)(g) seeks to “identify good practice” in protecting children. Was that left out of the previous inquiry? No, because paragraph 2.5 of the scope of the investigation makes it clear that the inquiry would also examine
“effective strategies…implemented to prevent child sexual exploitation in the future, and to monitor the safety of vulnerable children including missing children”.
On Second Reading, the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston accused the Government of not wanting to
“hear the voices of the victims.”—[Official Report, 8 January 2025; Vol. 759, c. 951.].
The new clause compounds the last Government’s crime of not listening to the victims when they had the chance to implement the recommendations of the specific national grooming gangs inquiry and the wider IICSA recommendations.
What new clause 15—the hon. Gentleman’s blueprint for a new inquiry—does not include is any requirement to look at the extent to which recommendations in previous reports and reviews were implemented by relevant public authorities at national and local levels. That requirement was in the previous grooming gangs inquiry, which was an attempt to build on learning rather than to be a rerun of previous inquiries. The previous grooming gangs inquiry notes that more than 400 previous recommendations were considered in this, as well as those arising from other recent reports and inquiries. This would be an obvious inclusion in any future inquiry, unless we did not want to draw attention to the previous Government’s failure to carry out a single one of the recommendations of the specific investigation into grooming gangs, or in the wider independent inquiry into child sexual abuse more broadly.
The three main functions of public inquiries are to investigate what happened, why it happened, and what can be done to prevent it happening again. Inquiries can make recommendations. What they cannot do is implement those recommendations; that is our job. Professor Alexis Jay, who knows more about this than anyone on this Committee, does not call for another national inquiry. She says that a new inquiry would cause further delay.
Having spent seven of my 17 years as a barrister on a public inquiry—although not into grooming gangs or the broader IICA—I can say quite forcefully that there is a universal principle here. Public inquiries cost time and enormous amounts of public money, but the biggest tab that they run up is in the hope that they give to victims—the hope that what they suffered will not be suffered in future by others. We must pay our debt to the victims by fully responding to the recommendations and implementing them where we can. If we call for inquiry after inquiry along the same lines, we are undermining the whole system of public inquiries, including public trust in them and public tolerance for the resources of the state that they demand. Therefore, rather than the gesture politics of rerunning an inquiry without the evidence and data that we need, it is the Government’s approach that makes sense, with Baroness Louise Casey’s audit to fill in the gaps that have already been identified by the previous inquiry.
This Government are setting up a new victims and survivors panel not just to guide Ministers on the design, delivery and implementation of plans on IICSA, but to produce wider work around child sexual exploitation and abuse. In the policing and crime Bill, they are making it mandatory to report abuse and will make it an offence to fail to report, or to cover up, child sexual abuse, as well as introducing further measures to tackle those organising online child sex abuse. They are legislating to make grooming an aggravating factor in sentencing for child sexual offences. They are already drawing up a duty of candour as part of the long-awaited Hillsborough law. And they are overhauling the information and evidence that is gathered on child sexual abuse and exploitation to implement the first recommendation of IICSA on a single core dataset on child abuse and protection.
New clause 15(2)(d) seeks to identify the ethnicity of members of grooming gangs. Sections B.5 and H.5 of the 2022 inquiry into grooming gangs identified the widespread failure to record the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims and the inconsistency of definitions in the data, which meant that the limited research available relied on poor-quality data.
Recommendation 5 from the report in February 2022 relates to child sexual exploitation data and states that the data must include
“the sex, ethnicity and disability of both the victim and perpetrator”.
In the final list of IICSA recommendations from October 2022, it was the first recommendation—a single core set of data. We do not have a core dataset, and the ethnicity data that was published in November from police forces has been found to be haphazard, because there is not a proper system for collecting data. It is this Government who have committed to gathering and publishing new ethnicity data, and it is this Government who are providing backing for local inquiries that can delve into local detail and deliver more locally relevant answers and change than a lengthy national inquiry of the type that I was involved in.