Sir Keir Starmer has defended his decision to hold a national inquiry into grooming gangs after previously accusing those calling for one of jumping on a far right bandwagon.
The prime minister told the BBC he had commissioned Dame Louise Casey to write a report to “double check” the issue and “having read it I agreed with her conclusion”.
“That, to me, is a practical, common sense way of doing politics,” he added.
Dame Louise said she wanted the inquiry to create a “national reset” on the grooming gangs issue and urged officials giving evidence to it to be “open” to scrutiny and change.
The Whitehall troubleshooter – who has worked on social issues for successive prime ministers since Tony Blair in the 1990s – is also chairing an independent commission into adult social care.
She put this on hold in January to carry out an audit of the nature and scale of group-based child sexual abuse in England and Wales.
It came amid renewed concern about grooming gangs, sparked in part by tech tycoon Elon Musk.
Labour ministers repeatedly rejected opposition calls for a national inquiry into the issue, announcing instead that there would be five local inquiries.
In January, Sir Keir accused those calling for a national inquiry of “jumping on a bandwagon” and “amplifying” the demands of the far right.
Baroness Casey’s report calls for a new national criminal operation overseen by the National Crime Agency (NCA) – and a national inquiry that co-ordinates local investigations into abuse.
It also highlights poor data collection on the ethnicity of perpetrators and suggests officials had “shied away” from the issue.
The report says 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”.
But Baroness Casey says more research is needed and calls for the mandatory collection of of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases.
Labour’s safeguarding minister Jess Phillips suggested in an interview with BBC Newsnight that some in Labour had put their heads in the sand over the ethnicity issue, although she insisted she had never “turned a blind eye” to it.
Asked about this, Sir Keir told the BBC: “I’ve long been concerned about people sticking their heads in the sand about all sorts of issues in relation to child sexual abuse.”
He said the national inquiry “must go wherever it needs to go, whether that’s a question of ethnicity or the role of public officials”.
Concern about child sexual exploitation and grooming gangs stretches back to 2010, when five men from the Asian community in Rotherham were jailed for sexual offences against underage girls.
A local inquiry uncovered widescale abuse in the town, where it was estimated 1,400 children were exploited between 1997 and 2013, predominantly by men of Pakistani heritage.
The report’s author, Baroness Jay, went on to produce a report in 2022 that warned of “endemic” abuse in communities across England and Wales, but its 20 recommendations have yet to be fully implemented.
Baroness Casey praised Baroness Jay’s work and stressed the need for action, and not words, from political leaders.
She said she did not think it was “unreasonable” to hold the government to account in six months’ time on whether her 12 recommendations have been implemented.
“I hope this is a line in the sand, and I think the 12 things that we’re asking for are not impossible,” she said.
“They’re not pipe dreams, they’re achievable.”
She also told MPs on the Home Affairs Committee she would like to see “quite a significant uplift in the prosecutions, the action, the criminal investigations on child sexual exploitation, both historic and current”.
She also stressed the importance of the report’s call to ensure adults who engage in penetrative sex with a child under 16 “face the most serious charge of rape” instead of lesser charges.
And she urged people to “keep calm” about the subject of ethnicity.
She told MPs: “If you look at the data on child sexual exploitation, suspects and offenders, it’s disproportionately Asian heritage.
“If you look at the data for child abuse, it is not disproportionate, and it is white men.”
She added: “Let’s just keep calm here about how you interrogate data and what you draw from it.”
Baroness Casey told BBC Newsnight she was “disappointed” by the politicisation of her report, adding that she felt opposition parties could have “come together” behind the government.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, speaking at a press conference with abuse survivors, said: “I do think that we should take the politics out of it.
“But who was it that said when we raised this issue, that we were pandering to the far right? That’s what brought the politics into it.”
Pressed over whether the Tories owed survivors an apology for not doing more to tackle grooming gangs when they were in power, Badenoch said: “I have apologised. But what I find extraordinary is that more people are interested in prosecuting a government that did some things, did not conclude, rather than looking at what needs to happen right now.”
Badenoch backed the three-year timescale proposed by Baroness Casey for the national inquiry into grooming gangs as “reasonable” – having previously called for it to be done within two years.
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