The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Yvette Cooper)
With permission, I will update the House on the audit the Government commissioned from Baroness Casey on child sexual exploitation and grooming gangs, and on the action we are taking to tackle this vile crime—to put perpetrators behind bars and to provide the innocent victims of those crimes with support and justice.
The House will be aware that on Friday seven men were found guilty of committing the most horrendous crimes in Rochdale between 2000 and 2006. They were convicted of treating teenage girls as sex slaves, repeatedly raping them in filthy flats, alleyways and warehouses. The perpetrators included taxi drivers and market traders of Pakistani heritage, and it has taken 20 years to bring them to justice. I pay tribute to the incredible bravery of the women who told their stories and fought for justice for all those years. They should never have been let down for so long.
The sexual exploitation of children by grooming gangs is one of the most horrific crimes. Children as young as 10, plied with drugs and alcohol, were brutally raped by gangs of men and disgracefully let down again and again by the authorities that were meant to protect them and keep them safe. These despicable crimes have caused the most unimaginable harm to victims and survivors throughout their lives and are a stain on our society.
Five months ago, I told the House that our most important task was to stop perpetrators and put them behind bars. I can report that that work is accelerating—arrests and investigations are increasing. I asked police forces in January to identify cases involving grooming and child sexual exploitation allegations that had been closed with no further action. More than 800 cases have now been identified for formal review, and I expect that figure to rise above 1,000 in the coming weeks.
Let me be clear: perpetrators of these vile crimes should be off our streets, behind bars, paying the price for what they have done. Further rapid action is also under way to implement recommendations of past inquiries and reviews, including the seven-year independent inquiry into child abuse—recommendations that have sat on the shelf for too long. In the Crime and Policing Bill, we are introducing the long-overdue mandatory reporting duty, which I called for more than 10 years ago, as well as aggravated offences for grooming offenders so that their sentences match the severity of their crimes.
Earlier this year, I also commissioned Baroness Louise Casey to undertake a rapid national audit of the nature, scale and characteristics of gang-based exploitation. I specifically asked her to look at the issue of ethnicity and the cultural and social drivers of this type of offending—analysis that previously had never been done despite years of concerns being raised. I asked her to advise us on what further reviews, investigations and actions would be needed to address the current and historical failures that she found.
I told Parliament in January that I expected Baroness Casey to deliver the same kind of impactful and no-holds-barred report that she produced on Rotherham in 2015, so that we never shy away from the reality of these terrible crimes. I am grateful that Louise and her team have done exactly that, conducting a hugely wide-ranging assessment in just four months. The findings of her audit are damning. At its heart, she identifies a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children, and a continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, exploitation and serious violence and from the scars that last a lifetime. She finds too much fragmentation in the authorities’ response, too little sharing of information, too much reliance on flawed data, too much denial, too little justice, too many criminals getting off and too many victims being let down.
The audit describes victims as young as 10—often those in care or children with learning or physical disabilities—being singled out for grooming precisely because of their vulnerability; perpetrators still walking free because no one joined the dots or because the law ended up protecting them instead of the victims they had exploited; and deep-rooted institutional failures, stretching back decades, where organisations that should have protected children and punished offenders looked the other way. Baroness Casey found that
“blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions”
all played a part in that collective failure.
On the key issues of ethnicity that I asked Baroness Casey to examine, she has found continued failure to gather proper robust national data, despite concerns being raised going back many years. In the local data examined from three police forces, the audit identifies clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men. Baroness Casey refers to
“examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions”.
These findings are deeply disturbing, but most disturbing of all, as Baroness Casey makes clear, is the fact that too many of them are not new. As her audit sets out, there have been 15 years of reports, reviews, inquiries and investigations into the appalling rapes, exploitation and violent crimes against children—detailed over 17 pages of her report—but too little has changed. We have lost more than a decade. That must end now. Baroness Casey sets out 12 recommendations for change, and we will take action on all of them immediately, because we cannot afford more wasted years.
We will introduce new laws to protect children and support victims so that they stop being blamed for the appalling crimes committed against them; new major police operations to pursue perpetrators and put them behind bars; a new national inquiry to direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures; new ethnicity data and research, so that we face up to the facts on exploitation and abuse; new action across children’s social services and other agencies to identify children at risk; and further action to support child victims and tackle new forms of exploitation and abuse online. Taken together, this will mark the biggest programme of work ever pursued to root out the scourge of grooming gangs and child sexual exploitation.
Those vile perpetrators who have grown used to the authorities looking the other way must have no place to hide, so let me spell out the next steps that we are announcing today. Baroness Casey’s first recommendation is that we must see children as children. She concludes that too many grooming cases have been dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges because a 13 to 15-year-old is perceived to have been in love with or consented to sex with the perpetrator, so we will change the law to ensure that adults who engage in penetrative sex with a child under 16 face the most serious charge of rape, and we will work closely with the Crown Prosecution Service and the police to ensure that there are safeguards for consensual teenage relationships. We will change the law so that those convicted for child prostitution offences while their rapists got off scot-free will have their convictions disregarded and their criminal records expunged.
Baroness Casey’s next recommendation is a national criminal investigation. As I have set out, arrests and investigations are rising, but the audit recommends that we go further, so I can announce that the police will launch a new national criminal operation into grooming gangs, overseen by the National Crime Agency. It will bring together for the first time all arms of the policing response and develop a rigorous new national operating model that all forces across the country will be able to adopt, ensuring that grooming gangs are always treated as serious and organised crime, and so that rapists who groom children—whether their crimes were committed decades ago or are still being committed today—can end up behind bars.
Alongside justice, there must also be accountability and action. We have begun implementing the recommendations from past inquiries, including Professor Jay’s independent inquiry, and we have said that further inquiries are needed to get accountability in local areas. I told the House in January that I would undertake further work on how to ensure that those inquiries could get the evidence that they needed to properly hold institutions to account. We have sought responses from local councils, too. We asked Baroness Casey to review those responses, as well as the arrangements and powers used in past investigations and inquiries, and to consider the best means of getting to the truth. Her report concludes that further local investigations are needed, but they should be directed and overseen by a national commission with statutory inquiry powers. We agree, and we will set up a national inquiry to that effect.
Baroness Casey is not recommending another overarching inquiry of the kind conducted by Professor Alexis Jay. She recommends that the inquiry be time-limited, and its purpose must be to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies. We will set out further details on the national inquiry in due course.
I warned in January that the data collection we inherited from the previous Government on ethnicity was completely inadequate; the data was collected on only 37% of suspects. Baroness Casey’s audit confirms that ethnicity data is not recorded for two thirds of grooming gang perpetrators, and that the data is
“not good enough to support any statements about the ethnicity of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders at the national level.”
I agree with that conclusion. Frankly, it is ridiculous and helps no one that this basic information is not collected, especially as there have been warnings and recommendations stretching back 13 years about the woefully inadequate data on perpetrators, which prevents patterns of crime from being understood and tackled.
The immediate changes to police recording practices that I announced in January are starting to improve the data, but we need to go much further. Baroness Casey’s audit examined local data in three police force areas—Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire —where high-profile cases involving Pakistani-heritage men have long been investigated and reported. She found there that the suspects of group-based child sexual offences were disproportionately likely to be Asian men. She also found indications of disproportionality in serious case reviews.
Although much more robust national data is needed, we cannot and must not shy away from those findings. 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”.
The vast majority of people in our British Asian and Pakistani-heritage communities continue to be appalled by these terrible crimes, and agree that the criminal minority of sick predators and perpetrators in every community must be dealt with robustly by criminal law.
Baroness Casey’s review also identifies prosecutions and investigations into perpetrators who are white British, European, African or middle eastern, just as Alexis Jay’s inquiry concluded that all ethnicities and communities were involved in appalling child abuse crimes. So that there is accurate information to help tackle serious crimes, we will, for the first time, make it a formal requirement to collect ethnicity and nationality data in all cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation. We will also commission new research on the cultural and social drivers of child sexual exploitation, misogyny and violence against women and girls, as Baroness Casey has recommended.
The audit’s final group of recommendations is about the continued failure of agencies that should be keeping children safe to share vital information or act on clear signs of risk. Worryingly, the audit finds that although the number of reports to the police of child sexual abuse and exploitation has gone up, the number of child sexual abuse cases identified for protection plans by local children’s services has fallen to its lowest ever, but no one has been curious about why that is. The audit also details an abysmal failure to respond to 15 years of recommendations and warnings about the failings of inter-agency co-operation. We will act at pace to deliver Baroness Casey’s recommendations for mandatory information-sharing between agencies, and for unique reference numbers for children, building on work already being taken forward by my right hon. Friend the Education Secretary. My right hon. Friend the Transport Secretary will also work at pace to close loopholes in taxi licensing laws.
I want to respond to three other important issues identified by Baroness Casey in her report, but on which she has not made specific recommendations. On support for victims, my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary will fund additional training for mental health staff in schools on identifying and supporting children and young people who have experienced trauma, exploitation and abuse. Baroness Casey reports that she came across cases involving suspects who were asylum seekers. We have asked her team to provide all the evidence they found to the Home Office, so that immigration enforcement can immediately pursue individual cases with the police. Let me make it clear that those who groom children or commit sexual offences will not be granted asylum in the UK, and we will do everything in our power to remove them. I do not believe that the law we have inherited is strong enough, so we are bringing forward a change to the law, so that anyone convicted of sexual offences is excluded from the asylum system and denied refugee status. We have already increased the removal of foreign national offenders by 14% since the election, and we are drawing up new arrangements to identify and remove those who have committed a much wider range of offences.
Finally, Baroness Casey describes ways in which patterns of grooming gang child sexual exploitation are changing, and evidence that rape and sexual exploitation are taking place in street gangs and drug gangs who combine criminal and sexual exploitation. I do not believe that this kind of exploitation has been investigated sufficiently. The report also describes sexual exploitation in modern slavery and trafficking cases. Most significantly of all, it describes the huge increase in online grooming, and horrendous online sexual exploitation and abuse, including through the use of social media apps to build up relationships and lure children into physical abuse. The audit quotes a police expert, who says:
“If Rotherham were to happen again today it would start online.”
We are passing world-leading laws to target those who groom and exploit children online, and investing in cutting-edge technology to target the highest-harm offenders, but we need to do much more, or the new scandals and shameful crimes of the future will be missed.
When the final report of Alexis Jay’s seven-year national inquiry was published in October 2022, the then Home Secretary, Grant Shapps, issued a profound and formal public apology to the victims of child sexual abuse who were so badly let down over decades by different levels of the state. As shadow Home Secretary at the time, I joined him in that apology on behalf of the Opposition, and extended it to victims of child sexual exploitation, too. To the victims and survivors of sexual exploitation and grooming gangs, on behalf of this and past Governments, and the many public authorities that let you down, I want to reiterate an unequivocal apology for the unimaginable pain and suffering that you have suffered, and for the failure of our country’s institutions, over decades, to prevent that harm and keep you safe.
But words are not enough; victims and survivors need action. The reforms that I have set out today will be the strongest action that any Government have taken to tackle child sexual exploitation. There will be more police investigations, more arrests, a new inquiry, changes to the law to protect children, and a fundamental overhaul of the way organisations work in order to support victims and put perpetrators behind bars, but none of that will work unless everyone is part of it, and everyone works together to keep our children safe. I commend this statement to the House.
Mr Speaker
Hopefully the report will be available in the Table Office for those Members who wish to see it. The Home Secretary quite rightly took longer than expected, and I have no problem with that. I say to the Leader of the Opposition, and to the Lib Dems, that it is available to them to do the same.
Mrs Kemi Badenoch (North West Essex) (Con)
I thank the Home Secretary for advance sight of the statement, although when I listened to it, I could not believe my ears. It was as if this was the Government’s plan all along, when we all know it is another U-turn. After months of pressure, the Prime Minister has finally accepted our call for a full, statutory, national inquiry into grooming gangs, and I welcome our finally reaching this point. We must remember that this is not a victory for politicians—especially not for the ones, like the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, who had to be dragged to this position. This is a victory for the survivors, who have been calling for this for years. However, I have been speaking to many who do not have confidence that a Government who ignored their concerns will deliver.
Before I turn to the detail of the Home Secretary’s statement, I want to recognise the tireless work of those who refused to let this issue be buried: survivors like Fiona Goddard, who bravely waived her anonymity; the parents of survivors, like Marlon West, who I spoke to this morning; Maggie Oliver, whose courage in speaking truth to power has been instrumental in bringing us to this point; the late Andrew Norfolk, whose fearless journalism brought these crimes to light; Baroness Casey for her review; and Charlie Peters, who has consistently been a voice for the voiceless.
The Prime Minister’s handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. His judgment has, once again, been found wanting. Since he became Prime Minister, he and the Home Secretary dismissed calls for an inquiry because they did not want to cause a stir. They accused those of us who demanded justice for the victims of this scandal of “jumping on a far-right bandwagon”, a claim that the Prime Minister’s official spokesman restated this weekend—shameful.
Time and again, it has been left to the Conservatives to force this issue. Three times—[Interruption.] They can all mutter now, but these Labour MPs voted against a national inquiry three times. The Liberal Democrats did not bother to vote at all—asleep at the wheel. Labour MPs voted against a reasoned amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, and in Committee they voted against the Bill. At Committee stage of the Crime and Policing Bill—[Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. Mr Swallow, I want you to set a good example. This is a very serious statement, and tempers are running high, but I certainly do not want to see you pointing, shouting and bawling in that way.
Mrs Badenoch
Mr Speaker, they can point and shout as much as they like; they know the truth, just as we on the Conservative Benches do. Three times—[Interruption.] I will repeat myself: Labour MPs voted against the reasoned amendment to the children’s Bill; in Committee, they voted against that Bill; and they voted against the Crime and Policing Bill in Committee. They voted against a national inquiry and, at Prime Minister’s questions, the Prime Minister repeatedly ruled out a national inquiry, to the cheers of all the Labour MPs who are now pretending that they believed in an inquiry all along.
No doubt, in her response to me, the Home Secretary will try to claim that the previous Government did nothing—a wholly false assertion that she should not repeat today. The Conservative Government took extensive action, starting with the original Jay report, commissioned in 2014 by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May. A year later, she commissioned the independent investigation into child sexual abuse, and Sajid Javid commissioned ethnicity data collection in 2018. It is wrong to claim, as the Home Secretary did, that ethnicity data collection had not been done. I remind her that the Foreign Secretary criticised Sajid Javid at the time, saying that he was bringing the office of Home Secretary “into disrepute”, and that he was pandering to the far-right for doing exactly what the Home Secretary says she will now do. They should be ashamed of themselves.
We accepted all the recommendations made by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse in 2022, except the recommendation to have a new Cabinet Minister, which would not have made any difference at all to the victims of this scandal. The Home Secretary claimed that the recommendations sat on the shelf, but let me be clear that we went further than those recommendations. It was the Conservatives who established the grooming gangs taskforce, which supported police forces to make 807 arrests for group-based child sexual exploitation last year, so do not tell me that we did nothing.
It is vital that this inquiry is robust, swift and, above all, independent.
There are legitimate concerns about institutions investigating themselves, especially as some of the most egregious cases of institutional failure occurred in Labour-controlled authorities. [Interruption.] Labour Members can moan as much as they like, but the people out there believe that is why nothing has happened yet. In Greater Manchester, Operation Augusta was prematurely shut down. In Rotherham, which has been under continuous Labour control since 1974, we saw repeated failures. In Telford, where Labour has predominantly held power, the current MP, the hon. Member for Telford (Shaun Davies), initially rejected calls for an inquiry while serving as council leader.
This inquiry must have teeth. It must start with known hotspots such as Bradford and Rochdale, and I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) for his persistent advocacy on this issue. We need clear commitments. For example, will the inquiry examine the role of ethnicity in these crimes, confronting hard truths about potential cover-ups motivated by fears of appearing racist? [Interruption.] There is no point in Labour Members muttering—the Home Secretary said it herself.
I spoke to the father of a survivor just this morning, and he told me that survivors need to have someone who is independent and who they can go to and trust. It is no use them being forced to speak to the same authorities who ignored them in the first place. Will this inquiry ensure that no one, whether police officers, councillors or council officials, is beyond scrutiny?
The Government’s approach to the Casey review itself raises serious concerns. While the review’s findings are crucial, we as legislators are sent here to make decisions, not to outsource the difficult ones. The Prime Minister has waited months for someone to take this decision for him. That is the kind of dithering and delay that the survivors complained about.
We need answers to the following questions. The House deserves to know what changed the Prime Minister’s mind from thinking that this was dog-whistle, far-right politics to something that he must do. When exactly did Baroness Casey submit her findings to Downing Street, and did the Government request any changes to her report? Does the Home Secretary agree that anyone in authority who deliberately covered up these disgusting crimes should be prosecuted for misconduct in public office and that those prosecutions should happen alongside, not after the inquiry? We believe that anyone in the police, local authorities, social services or even the CPS who covered this up because they cared more about so-called community relations than about protecting vulnerable girls as young as 10 years old should be pursued.
We welcome the Home Secretary’s comments about perpetrators not being able to make asylum claims. I remind her that we put forward an amendment to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, and she and all her colleagues voted against that very measure. Does she now agree that the perpetrators should also not be able to make human rights claims to avoid deportation, and will she legislate to do that? Will the inquiry be concluded within two years, and will every one of the 50 towns affected be covered, including Bradford, which is still refusing to conduct an inquiry into this? Will those local inquiries have the power to summon witnesses, or is that power only for the national inquiry? Most critically, we need a clear timeline for conclusions and actions. The victims cannot wait another decade for justice: we should be able to do this in two years.
Finally, we did not need to commission a report to tell us what we already knew. Will the Home Secretary apologise on behalf of herself, the Labour party and the Prime Minister for wasting so much time and voting against this, dismissing the concerns of the survivors? The House, the British public and, most importantly, the many brave survivors deserve clear answers from a Government of dithering and delay.
Yvette Cooper
I do not think the Leader of the Opposition can have read the report and seen the seriousness of its conclusions, because it sets out a timeline of failure from 2009 to 2025. Repeated reports and recommendations were not acted on: on child protection, on police investigations, on ethnicity data, on data sharing and on support for victims. For 14 of those 16 years, her party was in government, including years in which she was the Minister for children and families, then the Minister for equalities, covering race and ethnicity issues and violence against women and girls. I did not hear her raise any of these issues until January this year. She will know that the Prime Minister did not just raise them but acted on them: he brought the first prosecutions against grooming gangs and called for action to address ethnicity issues in 2012. She will also know that the safeguarding Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), and I have raised these issues repeatedly.
The Leader of the Opposition referred to Professor Alexis Jay’s independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. I called for that inquiry and strongly supported it, and we wanted it to work on a cross-party basis. We supported its conclusions, but the Leader of the Opposition’s party did absolutely nothing to implement them. Time and again, recommendations just sat on the shelf, and it has taken this Government to bring forward the mandatory duty to report. She says that we should ensure that people who have engaged in cover-ups are prosecuted. I agree, which is why the Labour party is changing the law to make that possible, so that cover-ups cannot happen and people are held to account.
The Leader of the Opposition also knows that in the vote she referred to, what she wanted to do—the amendment she tabled—would have wrecked the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. That Bill includes two of Baroness Casey’s recommendations to strengthen child protection, recommendations that the Leader of the Opposition and her party refused to introduce over 14 years. I am sorry that she chose not to join in the apology to victims and survivors for decades of failure in 2022. That apology was a cross-party one, which, if she really had victims’ interests and the national interest at heart, it should be again.
Paul Waugh (Rochdale) (Lab/Co-op)
I listened with cold fury to what was coming out of the mouth of the Leader of the Opposition, because much of it was beneath contempt. I commend the Home Secretary for her statement and for commissioning a fiercely independent figure such as Louise Casey to conduct this national audit, without which we would not have had today’s outcome.
In Rochdale, we know all too well how many years it has taken for victims to get the justice they deserve. They have waited many, many years to see these sick criminals locked up and put behind bars. Only last week, we had seven more of these perverts locked up in Rochdale, which is a testament to the police and the prosecution who finally got those cases together. However, the victims also want accountability for anyone in a position of authority, as the Home Secretary has said—anyone who found out about this, or knew about it, and failed to act. Does she agree that no councillor from any political party, no social worker, no police officer, no council officer and no ethnic group should hide from the fierce scrutiny of this national inquiry?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right to raise the appalling case in his constituency, where seven people were convicted on Friday. He will also know that further criminal investigations are still ongoing—it is shameful how long it has taken to get justice for those victims. I agree with him that no one can hide from justice on this appalling issue, on which victims and survivors have been let down for far too long. I hope that supporting that aim will be a cross-party process.
Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)
Child sexual abuse and exploitation are among the most abhorrent crimes imaginable, and we must all support every effort to deliver justice for victims and prevent these vile acts from happening again. It is, of course, right that the Government follow the recommendations of Baroness Casey’s report, including a new national inquiry. Survivors must be at the heart of this process. Their voices, experiences and insights must shape both the inquiry and its outcomes, and I would welcome hearing more from the Home Secretary about how she intends to ensure survivors are heard, are respected, and—essentially—are allowed to build on their existing testimony without being asked to repeat themselves and relive their abuse again and again.
The seven-year inquiry into child sexual abuse, chaired by Professor Alexis Jay, delivered its final report in 2022, and the Government at the time delivered none of its recommendations, leaving survivors waiting for justice. In her remarks, the Home Secretary mentioned two of Professor Jay’s recommendations being introduced through the Crime and Policing Bill: a mandatory reporting duty and aggravated offences for grooming offenders. What does this new inquiry mean for the remaining recommendations of Professor Jay? Will victims and survivors see all 20 recommendations implemented while the new inquiry is being carried out?
Any new inquiry must be more than symbolic; it must be robust, victim-centred and capable of driving real change. A duty of candour would require public officials and authorities to co-operate fully with such an inquiry, so it continues to be disappointing that the Government have delayed bringing that provision forward. I ask the Home Secretary plainly: what is stopping the Government from introducing a duty of candour via a Hillsborough law now?
Finally, now that Baroness Casey has completed her review, I welcome her appointment as chair of the independent commission into adult social care. I trust that she will bring to that hugely important role the same determination to challenge injustice and to champion the voices of those too often left unheard.
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Member makes important points about the seriousness of this crime, and she is right, too, that we need to continue to implement the recommendations of the overarching inquiry into child abuse. The Safeguarding Minister updated the House before Easter on those recommendations and the action we are taking forward on them. I can tell the hon. Lady that in the Home Office, measures are already well under way, and we will continue to do that. It is important that we do not simply have recommendations sitting on shelves—things have to be implemented.
On the Hillsborough law, we are working at pace to get the details right and to bring it before the House. The hon. Lady will understand that it needs to meet the expectations of the Hillsborough families, as well as be right for the House. We will continue to work on the wider issues, too. In her foreword, Baroness Casey says:
“If we’d got this right years ago—seeing these girls as children raped rather than ‘wayward teenagers’ or collaborators in their abuse, collecting ethnicity data, and acknowledging as a system that we did not do a good enough job—then I doubt we’d be in this place now.”
We lost a decade. We cannot lose another one.
Naz Shah (Bradford West) (Lab)
First, may I thank the Home Secretary for her statement and for her leadership and commitment to getting a grip on this issue? As a Member of Parliament for one of the largest constituencies of Muslim and Pakistani heritage people, I know the sheer anger and condemnation that the vast majority of them share, like all Britons who are against those who commit these vile actions and vile sexual abuse. That is backed up not only by recent polling by Opinium showing that a majority of Muslims are deeply concerned about grooming gangs, but by sermons in mosques, letters from leading figures, demonstrations on the streets and so much more that is often not given the media coverage it deserves. I am pleased to see that the National Crime Agency will be involved in the future inquiries. Let me reiterate in this House that British Muslims stand on the side of victims and support the full force of the law being used against all perpetrators of abuse. Does the Home Secretary agree that those who display selective outrage or fan the flames to blame entire communities do nothing to protect innocent victims or further the cause of victims?
Yvette Cooper
May I welcome my hon. Friend’s points that she makes about the anger in her community and the anger across British Muslim communities towards the grooming gangs, towards the rape of children and towards these appalling crimes? She has long called for work, including stronger action from the police to be able to go after perpetrators and bring them to justice. She is right that the horror at crimes committed against children and in particular against young girls is shared across communities. It is in the interests of those children and victim-survivors that we have reforms now.
Dame Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)
I thank the Home Secretary for her statement and for early sight of it, and I am pleased that Baroness Casey has agreed to appear before the Committee tomorrow to set out the contents of her report more clearly. However, I am concerned about the potential for inquiries intended to get to the truth to prejudice criminal trials. How does the Home Secretary envisage the two elements running alongside each other—an inquiry and criminal prosecutions?
Yvette Cooper
I welcome that question, and I am glad that Baroness Casey will have the opportunity to set out more details of her findings. As the right hon. Lady will know, Baroness Casey has huge expertise and determination, and will be forthright in giving the evidence that she has drawn together.
It will be important for the commission conducting the independent inquiry to have arrangements with police forces to ensure that criminal investigations that are currently under way are not cut across. It is also important to ensure that we can uncover institutional failings, because institutional failures to pursue action, or the turning of a blind eye, need to be looked into in particular areas, as part of the local investigations and the national inquiry. As the right hon. Lady will know, arrangements of this kind have featured in past inquiries, so they can be made and will need to be made again now.
Shaun Davies (Telford) (Lab)
Let me first praise and pay tribute to survivors across the country, and draw attention again to the survivors who worked in Telford along with me and various organisations to carry out the local review. We did so because the then Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, and the then local government Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), refused to provide a statutory inquiry into what had happened in Telford. That is why we worked with the police and crime commissioner—who happens to be a Conservative—and with people across the political spectrum to take this matter out of the party political field and try to find answers in our small part of the world.
What we need, though, is action. We need action in respect of the Jay inquiry and in respect of the Casey review, but does the Home Secretary agree that we also need action in respect of the number of local reviews that have taken place up and down the country whose findings have not been on the desks of Ministers over the last 14 years and which have therefore not received the attention that they deserve?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right: what we need is change and action, and recommendations from inquiries need to be implemented. Part of the strength of the Telford inquiry lay in the fact that victims and survivors were at its very heart, and there were also serious plans to ensure, and ways of ensuring, that the recommendations were implemented. That is crucial. It is no good having inquiries if recommendations just sit on the shelf; we must ensure that they are implemented, as well as pursuing answers.
Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)
The fact that victims and survivors of this horrific crime literally had to become campaigners themselves to reach this outcome should make everyone in the House stop and think. When I last met the Safeguarding Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), along with the leading child abuse lawyer David Greenwood, we pointed out the fundamental flaw in her Government’s grooming gangs strategy: namely, the completely ridiculous decision to give council leaders in areas such as Keighley and Bradford the option to simply say no to an inquiry. Now that we have an inquiry equipped with statutory powers, may I ask the Home Secretary what message she has for local leaders in my region who think that they can still get away with saying no, and what message she has for victims such as Fiona Goddard, who is also from my area and who will no doubt be worrying, like me, that there will still be no focus on Keighley and the wider Bradford district?
Yvette Cooper
I know that the hon. Member has met the Safeguarding Minister. She has spoken again to Fiona Goddard this morning to ensure that the voices of victims, survivors and campaigners are at the heart of the inquiry. He will know that the Safeguarding Minister said to him in their meeting that she would not allow local councils to be able to turn their backs and say no to investigations where they are needed. That is why we have accepted Baroness Casey’s recommendation to have a national inquiry that will underpin those local investigations. Obviously, the final decisions will be matters for the independent chair of the commission, but we will ensure that the hon. Member’s concerns and those of victims are passed on the national inquiry.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
I thank my right hon. Friend for her statement. I also pass on my thanks to Dame Louise Casey for meeting Oldham victims and survivors of CSE. They want no further delays to justice, and for perpetrators to face the full force of the law now. It is unacceptable that some are being given court dates for 2028, with all the risks that that implies. They want no more red tape, and they want survivors to be at the heart of rooting out perpetrators and getting justice. Can the Home Secretary ensure that this will happen, and will she now consider making misogyny a hate crime?
Yvette Cooper
I welcome what my hon. Friend has done over many years to champion victims in Oldham and across her constituency, and to work with survivors. She is right to point to the terrible delays in the justice system. She will know that the Lord Chancellor is taking forward reforms to look at how the huge backlog, particularly in Crown court cases, can be dealt with. Justice delayed is justice denied, and so many survivors have already waited far too long for justice. I assure my hon. Friend that those concerns are uppermost in the Lord Chancellor’s mind.
Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)
Regardless of whether local inquiries are commissioned by councils, will there be an opportunity for those same areas to fall under the remit of the national inquiry, to ensure that some of the ongoing issues to which the Home Secretary herself has referred are caught within the new framework of the inquiry?
Yvette Cooper
The right hon. Gentleman raises an important question. Ultimately, the final decisions will need to be for the independent chair and the commission—that is what happens when we set it up as a national inquiry, rather than a Government process. He will know that concerns have been raised about investigations and inquiries that have taken place in Greater Manchester, where some areas could not be compelled to take part. As a result, there has been work with His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary to pursue the final stages of an investigation and inquiry. We did look at whether there were other powers, either through local government Acts or through police inspection powers. However, the simplest way to address this issue is for it to be done through the national inquiry. The right hon. Gentleman will be able to make representations about his area, and other MPs will be able to make representations about their areas too.
Andrew Pakes (Peterborough) (Lab)
I welcome the statement and the absolute determination of Baroness Casey and this Government to hold to account perpetrators and those who may have been involved in cover-ups. One of the report’s recommendations is about the confusion between different agencies, and a particular element of that is about taxi licensing and taxis from out-of-town areas. I know from my city of Peterborough the challenge to law-abiding, decent taxi drivers who are undercut by different licensing laws, but also to law enforcement and the safety of passengers when we have number plates from different areas. I note that that is the focus of one of the recommendations. Can my right hon. Friend give us more details on how we will move at speed to create a level playing field nationally, so that passengers are safe and drivers have the support they need to keep everyone safe?
Yvette Cooper
I welcome my hon. Friend’s point. As he will know, many local authorities across the country have worked to ensure that they raise standards and checks in their licensing arrangements, particularly those in areas where there have been serious problems and criminal cases. However, those checks and safeguards can end up being undermined by the licensing of taxis in other areas that do not have such checks, so we are looking to take forward reforms to the law. The Transport Secretary is looking at exactly this issue to make sure that we find a way to close the loophole.
Josh Babarinde (Eastbourne) (LD)
As a survivor of child sexual abuse myself, I stand in solidarity with the many victims and survivors the system has failed over many, many years. I can say that the horror, the trauma and the guilt never leave you, and I so hope that every survivor who is identified receives the mental health and other support that they deserve to help rebuild their lives.
Survivors have witnessed very many promises, the 20 recommendations and the call of “never again” time and again. What will the Home Secretary do, and how will she reassure them that this will not be another one of those examples?
Can I just say that I am really let down and disgusted that the Leader of the Opposition began her remarks with a party political assault on her opponents? Victims and survivors deserve more than a smug “I told you so” diatribe. Victims and survivors deserve action.
Yvette Cooper
I thank the hon. Member for speaking out about his experience. I do not underestimate how brave it is and how difficult it can be to do that, and he will be giving all kinds of support to other victims and survivors simply by the fact that he has done so.
The hon. Member is right to raise the challenge of how we ensure that recommendations are actually implemented. He will know that we want to extend therapeutic support to victims and survivors, but as the Health Secretary is setting out, we will start by providing additional support and training for those who provide mental health support in our schools.
Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)
At Manchester Minshull Street Crown court last week, seven men were convicted for sickening crimes as part of a grooming gang. One of their victims, girl A, who was abused by in excess of 50 men, was advised by the police to make a claim for criminal injuries compensation, for which she would have received just £22,000. She did not make a claim, but that did not stop the defence from arguing that she made up accusations to bolster a claim for compensation.
The Government will be aware that I have raised on many occasions the inadequacies of the criminal injuries compensation framework for victims of sexual violence and exploitation, and they will be aware of recommendations from the IICSA review and the Victims’ Commissioner on this matter. While no amount of money could be adequate to compensate victims such as girl A, we owe it to them to ensure that they have the financial support required to rebuild their lives and do not have to choose between that and justice. How much longer will we all be waiting for this?
Yvette Cooper
I thank my hon. Friend for raising this matter. The Safeguarding Minister takes this issue very seriously, and we cannot have issues relating to the criminal injuries compensation scheme being raised in court in a way that undermines victims and survivors, who have bravely shown that they are able to speak out about abuse that has haunted their lives for so long. We will look at this issue further.
Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)
I welcome the statement from the Home Secretary, and the fact that there will now be a national inquiry. Does the Home Secretary think that it will be finished within, let us say, two years for the British people? Given that she quite rightly apologised to the victims and survivors, will she apologise on behalf of the Prime Minister, who smeared and labelled those of us who called for a national inquiry?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Member raises the timescale. In the discussions we have had with Baroness Casey, and recognising the many issues that people want to raise in the inquiry, we had expected that it would take around three years, but if the commission is able to work faster than that, people will clearly want answers as swiftly as possible. The final details about the timings are obviously to be determined.
We need to make sure both that we are implementing the recommendations of previous inquiries and that we are pursuing further the investigations in local areas as swiftly as possible. I reiterated in my statement a recognition of the huge harm that has been done to victims and survivors through the decades. I would urge the hon. Member to look at the 17-page section of Louise Casey’s report on the failure, year after year, to follow through and take action, and I do believe that victims and survivors are owed an apology for that failure over very many years.
Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall and Camberwell Green) (Lab/Co-op)
I think it is fair to say that although there are many issues in this House we disagree on, an issue of this magnitude is something that should bring all of us, as parliamentarians, together to work to ensure that we get justice for the victims. The Home Secretary outlined the next phase, but if we are really honest with ourselves, for every victim who has come forward to share her horrific testimony, there are so many more girls up and down the country who have not come forward. It is in their interests that we make sure we get this right. The Home Secretary outlined the issues around data and the lack of data gathering. One area I have raised consistently is criminal exploitation by gangs who sexually exploit young people and then use them to carry out their horrific county lines up and down the country. Does the Home Secretary agree that the collection of data must also lay with the Metropolitan police, other police forces across the country and the British Transport police?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right that so many victims and survivors do not come forward. We need to make it easier for people to do so, and recognise the scale of abuse. I agree with her on the really important issue about county lines and the interaction between criminal exploitation and sexual exploitation. Too often, the county lines and criminal exploitation is seen as an issue involving teenage boys, but very often teenage girls are also drawn in—and very often, that also means sexual exploitation. I do not believe that enough investigation has yet been done into that particular pattern and form of child sexual abuse and exploitation. As we strengthen the law on the criminal exploitation of children, we need to ensure that this issue is properly pursued, as she says, as part of the data gathering and through further research.
Esther McVey (Tatton) (Con)
This Government have been dragged kicking and screaming to deliver a national inquiry, having dismissed the pleas of the nation as jumping on a far-right bandwagon. That reluctance is why my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) will continue his inquiry and why I will be supporting him it. Will the Government’s inquiry investigate the political motivations behind the cover-ups, including the role of the Labour party, or will that continue to be swept under the carpet?
Yvette Cooper
Everyone should want not just to get to the truth about past failures, but to ensure we make the changes to protect children for the future. That includes changes in social services; changes in policing and the police operation, which I hope the right hon. Lady would welcome, to take action to put perpetrators behind bars; and action to gather proper ethnicity data, which simply has not been gathered properly before. Louise Casey’s report is very clear: the data gathering that the right hon. Lady’s Government left behind is totally inadequate. I hope she will agree to all those factors being extremely important, so that we can get stronger protection, and truth, for victims.
Mrs Elsie Blundell (Heywood and Middleton North) (Lab)
I welcome the Government’s announcement that there will be a national inquiry. Every penny spent on stamping out the evil of child abusers is money well spent. Although welcome, notice of this inquiry will undoubtedly cause a great deal of trauma and distress for both historic and present-day victims, as violations committed against them are revisited. As the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) referenced, what steps can the Government take to ensure that victims and witnesses have access to robust mental health support? How can we ensure that our courts—as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams)—especially in places like Greater Manchester that face extensive court backlogs, are sufficiently resourced to ensure that at the end of the process justice is finally delivered?
Yvette Cooper
I know that my hon. Friend has championed victims and survivors in her area and community. She is right to say that we have to make sure that victims and survivors get support. Some 7,000 victims and survivors gave evidence to the original Professor Alexis Jay inquiry. It is so important that they did not do so in vain, and that we make the reforms and the changes related to that recommendation. My hon. Friend is also right to say we need to increase the therapeutic support for victims and survivors. That will start with providing additional support for children.
Dr Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth) (Con)
One of the reasons I was not supportive six months ago, in January, of the Government’s strategy was that it could not compel local inquiries to bring forward witnesses, which is key. Listening to our questions carefully, could the Home Secretary clarify whether those local inquiries will be able to compel witnesses, whether that is also the case on the national side, and whether those powers will be used to ensure that no stone is left unturned?
Yvette Cooper
The answer is yes. I recognise that the hon. Gentleman has raised this issue. Back in January, I said that I would undertake further work to ensure that the local investigations had the powers to compel witnesses in order to be able to get the evidence. We agree with Baroness Casey and have concluded that the right way to do this is to have the national inquiry, which will mean that every local investigation has full powers to compel witnesses and evidence. Where and how those investigations take place will be directed by the national commission and the national inquiry, in order to ensure they have those full powers in place.
Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)
The crime we are discussing today is not just an historic crime; it is happening right now out in communities, and we are failing to protect the current victims of this awful child abuse. I welcome the new inquiry, but my concern is about delay. We have had plenty of inquiries, taskforces and reviews whose conclusions have not been implemented. My concern is that this new inquiry will monopolise our attention, when we should also be focused on protecting victims right now. Will the Home Secretary commit to this inquiry not detracting or diverting resource from the recommendations that we know need to be implemented and to rolling out nationally the devolved child trafficking pilot, which we know has been working for four years, in order to protect child victims?
Yvette Cooper
I can tell my hon. Friend that we are going to expand that, and that we will not let up the pace of implementing measures and recommendations. That includes the work that the Education Secretary is already doing on the mandatory sharing of data on children at risk, the new identifiers and the measures in the Crime and Policing Bill on mandatory reporting. Crucially, we have also already increased the resources for policing operations to be able to review closed cases. That is why we already have 800 cases identified for review, although we expect that figure shortly to rise to over 1,000 cases. Those are cases that were closed with no further action being taken that are now being looked at again—not waiting for the inquiry, but taking action now to protect children.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
The hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) and I are the sole remaining Members of the House who served on the Communities and Local Government Committee when we conducted the inquiries into Rotherham, in both November 2014 and March 2015. We heard from the victims then about the terrible abuse they had suffered and interviewed Dame Louise Casey at great length about her concerns over what was happening and what was being allowed to happen. There is clearly still something going on, which is that most victims are young girls from broken homes who have been taken into care by local authorities and have never experienced the love of a family. They then take the view that someone expressing some form of love is something that they should like and enjoy, when the reality is that they are being ruthlessly exploited by individuals who should know better, and are evil.
The key concern here is the lackadaisical approach that has been taken by many local authorities, social workers, police forces and other bodies. My genuine concern, which I am sure is shared by other Members, is that a local inquiry will not get individuals who either turned a blind eye or actually participated in the abuse to give evidence. Will the Home Secretary ensure that witnesses are called to those inquiries under oath so that we can get to the bottom of this, and make sure that those who turned a blind eye to or connived in this abuse are brought to justice as well as the perpetrators?
Yvette Cooper
I reassure the hon. Member that the point of having the national inquiry is to ensure that where local institutions are being examined, the commission has powers to compel witnesses, take evidence under oath and gather information, papers and evidence as it sees fit to make sure that we can get to the heart of this institutional failure.
The hon. Member is also right to say that this is about vile criminals knowing when young children—teenage girls especially—are vulnerable to the most appalling exploitation and coercion. They play with children’s emotions and vulnerability to draw them into what is ultimately violent crime and the most terrible abuse. This raises questions, particularly when the number of child protection cases around sexual abuse identified by social services has dropped. We are very concerned about that, and the Education Secretary is now investigating. There is also a failure to properly share data about the children who are at risk—the ones who are going missing. The hon. Member mentions the evidence from the work he and the Communities and Local Government Committee did 10 years ago about missing children and children in care. It is all the same evidence now, and we have got to be better at pursuing the evidence.
Joani Reid (East Kilbride and Strathaven) (Lab)
I strongly welcome the Home Secretary’s announcement of an inquiry and its commitment to survivors. It is absolutely right that the inquiry focuses on local areas where we know that survivors have been failed by the authorities that were supposed to protect them, but it is also essential that we draw lessons for the whole UK. Earlier this year, Professor Alexis Jay from the University of Strathclyde warned the Home Affairs Committee that Scotland is not immune to the kind of organised abuse that we have witnessed elsewhere in the UK. Scotland’s victims and survivors deserve the same assurances on accountability and robust safeguarding measures as anywhere else in the UK, so will the Home Secretary actively seek engagement with the Scottish Government, and offer them support and advice to ensure that they wholeheartedly implement the Jay recommendations effectively?
Yvette Cooper
I welcome my hon. Friend’s point. The Minister for Safeguarding will follow up these issues with the devolved Administrations. My hon. Friend is right that this is a devolved issue but that this kind of appalling crime is happening everywhere. Action is needed everywhere to safeguard and protect children.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. I appreciate how sensitive the topic is, but longer questions mean that fewer colleagues will get in. Shorter answers from the Secretary of State will help as well.
Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)
At one of my surgeries, I heard from a civil servant who had gathered evidence for the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse across the whole of England. They described themselves as being
“left emotionally and physically drained”
after collecting evidence, only for the Government not to act on it. I welcome this Government’s acceptance of the 12 Casey review findings, but will the Secretary of State assure my constituent and other civil servants that there will be no delay in implementing the findings of the IICSA?
Yvette Cooper
I can assure the hon. Member that we are taking forward the recommendations already. The Minister for Safeguarding updated the House on all the IICSA recommendations before Easter. Some require legislation, including legislation that is passing through the House at the moment. We will have further discussions on those issues later this week. We are already able to take forward some of the issues, and we will continue to update the House on the progress of the recommendations.
Catherine Atkinson (Derby North) (Lab)
I welcome this evidence-led action on grooming gangs. It takes courage to come forward and share deeply traumatic experiences, so will the Home Secretary confirm that this inquiry will build on the evidence already collected and recommendations made over previous inquiries, investigations and reports, including the last national inquiry, which in 2022 produced a 200-page report specifically on grooming gangs and looked at over 400 recommendations that had already been made? Crucially, will she ensure that there is no delay to the action that this Government are already taking to bring perpetrators to justice, stamp out these vile crimes and protect our vulnerable children?
Yvette Cooper
I agree with my hon. Friend. We have agreed to implement all the recommendations from the two-year inquiry into child sexual exploitation conducted as part of the Professor Alexis Jay review. We are taking forward one of those—on aggravated sentencing for grooming offences—as part of the Crime and Policing Bill. We are also introducing similar, parallel arrangements for online abuse because we must ensure that we are also taking action on online grooming, which has escalated and accelerated since Professor Jay’s work.
David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)
My Hillingdon constituents have seen the work that the local authority has had to do over many decades to deal with child sexual exploitation and trafficking arising from Heathrow. When I led the Local Government Association’s response—when these cases first came to light—one issue that arose was the sharing of information. Will the Home Secretary assure the House that, following this inquiry, she will upgrade the status of the “Working Together to Safeguard Children” guidance and, in particular, ensure that those bodies accountable to the Home Office, such as the police, understand it and take it as seriously as other bodies do so that we do not see people falling through the cracks between agencies?
Yvette Cooper
I welcome the hon. Member’s points. Baroness Casey’s review identifies that sexual exploitation is a central part of trafficking, and modern slavery as well. I agree with him about the importance of sharing information. Time and again on these basic things, everybody says the right words and then it does not happen in practice. We need the law to change, but we also need systems to change to make it easier to share that information. We will take that forward both in policing and as part of the work that my right hon. Friend the Education Secretary is doing so that it is much easier to share that information.
Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that there has been no vote on whether to have a national inquiry into grooming gangs—the vote was about the safeguards of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill—and that following the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse and the 200 pages that dealt specifically with grooming gangs, the Government were right to have the local inquiries and the rapid national audit? Now that Baroness Casey has recommended a national inquiry into grooming gangs, the Conservative party should be working with us for the sake of the victims rather than attempting to score political points, as the Leader of the Opposition did.
Yvette Cooper
Baroness Casey’s audit was conducted in just four months but looked at some of the issues in considerable detail. It also sets out the fact that we have had 16 years of different reports and inquiries—that includes some of the issues around the 200-page report that my hon. Friend refers to, and other reports as well. The crucial thing is that we need action. Victims and survivors need answers, and we need to pursue serious failings wherever they are found, but we must also ensure that when recommendations are made, they are implemented.
Llinos Medi (Ynys Môn) (PC)
Plaid Cymru welcomes the Government’s statement and hope that it will lead to concrete, properly funded action. In February, a Plaid Cymru amendment called on the Welsh Government to work with police forces on an all-Wales audit of child abuse cases, and it was backed unanimously. What concrete steps have been taken between the Welsh and UK Governments since the passing of that vote to bring justice to victims?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Member will know that many of the issues around social services provisions are matters for the Welsh Government, but issues around policing are covered by the Home Office. We have already been working with police forces across the country to strengthen the work of the child sexual exploitation taskforce to be able to look at different cases that have been closed, as well as to strengthen their work with local partners to be able to pursue these terrible crimes. As part of the policing operation that will be led by the National Crime Agency and draw on expertise from across the country, we will ensure that that connects with the work being done by the Welsh Government. The Safeguarding Minister is following up with devolved Administrations.
Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Further to the quite pertinent comment from the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), this country’s broken social care system for children is potentially creating future victims today, and while a review at local level will look at what happened in the past, we need to do our best to make sure that these crimes by appalling people do not continue. What more will the Home Secretary be doing with the Department for Education to ensure that young people who are being groomed online and groomed in public can spot the signs so that they know when and how to ask for help? Otherwise, unfortunately, we could see this cycle continuing for decades to come.
Yvette Cooper
I agree with my hon. Friend that we need action across social services, and that is why the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that the Education Secretary is taking forward is so important. The issues around online grooming and exploitation are immensely important. This is both about the abuse that stays online, often forcing children to get involved in the most appalling abuse and acts through online blackmail, pressure and coercion, and about the way in which this is used to provoke offline activity leading to offline physical abuse and contact abuse. We are working with the National Crime Agency on new technology to address this and with the Education Department on how we build children’s resilience in dealing with these crimes.
Sir Roger Gale (Herne Bay and Sandwich) (Con)
Much has been made in the House this afternoon of the fact that the former Director of Public Prosecutions, now the Prime Minister, instigated a prosecution against grooming gangs. That being so, he was clearly better placed than most of us to understand the need for the national inquiry that he initially so rigidly resisted, but I would like to associate myself with the apology offered by the right hon. Lady to the House on behalf of all of us and all the authorities that have failed young people so dismally. Those young people now want to know that they can have confidence and trust in the national inquiry, and in who leads it. Can she tell the House who that is likely to be, and what terms of reference they will have?
Yvette Cooper
The terms of reference will be set out in due course. We have not yet appointed or determined the chair for the national inquiry. We will do so and set that out for the House. I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s response on the issue of the national apology for the historical and current challenges that have led to victims being let down over very many years. I think his response echoes the way in which the whole House came together in 2022 around similar support for victims.
Gurinder Singh Josan (Smethwick) (Lab)
I welcome the Casey report and the new actions outlined by the Secretary of State today. I specifically welcome the requirement for the collection of ethnicity and nationality data. The report refers to different and changing models and patterns of abuse. The Secretary of State will be aware that there have been historical allegations involving the grooming and sexual abuse of Sikh girls. Will she ensure that the requirement to collect ethnicity and nationality data extends to victims, so that we can see the evidence for any such model once and for all?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend raises an important issue about victims. Victims in the many communities that he has talked about, including Sikh girls, often lack the confidence to come forward and feel the sense of shame that prevents young people from being able to ask for help when they need it. It is therefore essential that we strengthen the ethnicity data around victims as well as around perpetrators, to make sure that victims and survivors in all communities get the support and safeguarding they need.
Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)
The official document published online by the Government says that the national inquiry will only
“co-ordinate a series of targeted local investigations.”
How many local investigations will the inquiry co-ordinate? Will it cover the whole of England and Wales—yes or no?
Yvette Cooper
The decisions about which areas are looked into, and how many, will be matters for the commission. We envisage the commission lasting for three years. I know that the Leader of the Opposition suggested two years, but we think it will need around three years to be able to pursue the scale of work that is needed. I think it is right that the final decisions are ones for the commission and the independent national inquiry itself, and it will be able to look anywhere across England and Wales and to pursue the evidence wherever it sees fit.
Sam Carling (North West Cambridgeshire) (Lab)
I thank the Home Secretary for the robust measures she has laid out. Can she reaffirm the commitment that the Government made in January that the IICSA recommendations relevant to the Home Office will be implemented in full?
Yvette Cooper
Yes, I can. That work is either completed or well under way.
Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)
In an era when information is increasingly contested and weaponised, political parties would do well to lead by example by providing credible information and avoiding the spread of disinformation, including about the events, proceedings and procedures of this House. Given that Baroness Casey’s report addresses what is, frankly, a matter of the utmost sensitivity involving highly vulnerable young girls, will the Secretary of State ensure that the operation and eventual findings of the report are communicated clearly, responsibly and in a timely manner to the public, and that disinformation is actively countered to prevent political distortion, the incitement of harm and the further diminution of public trust?
Yvette Cooper
I respect the hon. Member’s important points. In fact, inaccurate information was one of the issues that Baroness Casey raised. Whether it is about ethnicity or anything else, inaccurate information can cause huge problems, and the more we ensure that information is robust, the better. As the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee said, Baroness Casey will also give evidence tomorrow, so people will be able to hear directly from her as well as reading her report.
Harpreet Uppal (Huddersfield) (Lab)
The victims and survivors of grooming gangs and CSE have been institutionally let down, and we must ensure that they are front and centre in our approach. I join other colleagues in saying that court delays must be looked at. They are a particular issue in West Yorkshire, and it is traumatic for the survivors. Baroness Casey reports on the Smith algorithm developed by West Yorkshire police, which brought hundreds of people into scope as victims and survivors and helped prosecution rates. Will that best practice be shared?
Yvette Cooper
Baroness Casey was impressed by the work that West Yorkshire police had done using what it called the Smith algorithm; it is included in her report. It looks at risk factors, such as children missing from home or school, those with repeated missing episodes, and children in care, and at areas where risks were high. It uses that to identify people who might be victims of child grooming and sexual abuse and exploitation, and then to pursue that evidence. West Yorkshire police has had a series of effective and successful prosecutions that have put perpetrators behind bars, so I join my hon. Friend in welcoming that work.
Joy Morrissey (Beaconsfield) (Con)
I would like to ask the Home Secretary about the historical sexual abuse and child sexual abuse of Sikh women and children. The Sikh community has said that when Sikh girls went to the local authority or the police, they were told—even by the media—that it was an “ethnic problem”, or that it was an “Asian problem”. I welcome the fact that the Home Secretary will be recording data, but what data will that be? Will Sikh girls who have been abused no longer just be told that it is an “Asian problem”?
Yvette Cooper
I welcome the hon. Member’s point. It is immensely important that victims and survivors in every community of every ethnicity can get justice and the support they need, and that issues around race and ethnicity are never used as an excuse to ignore victims or to fail to pursue criminals committing the most terrible crimes. We want to work with the police to ensure not only that we can get effective data and recording on victims, but that the right kind of services and support are in place so that every victim is heard.
Clive Efford (Eltham and Chislehurst) (Lab)
I am shocked that the Conservatives do not seem able to recognise that they were in power for 14 of the 15 years to which Louise Casey refers in her report. If they had had any kind of enthusiasm for an inquiry when they were in government, they would have called one—so we can dismiss them.
Is my right hon. Friend confident that we are hearing the voice of the victims—the children and their parents? When we had a similar problem when I was in local government back in the ’90s, we set up a thing called Childline to give a direct voice to young people so that they could raise their concerns. Does she think that we should have a similar thing here so that victims of child sexual exploitation can have their voices heard?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point. On the history and the action that has been taken, one thing that Baroness Casey criticises in particular is a 2020 report produced by the Home Office under the previous Government. She says that the conclusions that it came to were simply not justified by the data, and that the data gathered was inadequate. I think everyone should recognise that sufficient action has not been taken, be it on data, sharing or implementing recommendations. On victims and survivors, the Minister for Safeguarding is doing immensely important work to look at ways of ensuring that their voices can be at the heart of the new national inquiry and all Home Office work in this area.
Sarah Bool (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
I do not believe that I heard an answer to a number of the questions asked by the Leader of the Opposition, so I will ask the Home Secretary again. When did Baroness Casey submit her findings, and did the Government request any changes?
Yvette Cooper
Ten days ago, and this is Baroness Casey’s independent report. Anybody who suggests that she would change her views and reports for anyone has not met her.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
I welcome the pace and focus that the Home Secretary has brought to Baroness Casey’s report. She is right to highlight the risk of the online space and the rapidity with which it has become a focus. Can she give assurances that protocols will change accordingly, so that we look for the information that we do not know about, and that the cases of survivors and victims who have been criminalised will be quashed, so that those people do not carry convictions for the exploitation that they experienced?
Yvette Cooper
I welcome my hon. Friend’s point about the need to ensure that victims are not criminalised for the coercion and crimes committed against them. That failure—the tendency to blame victims for the appalling crimes committed against them—has been a pervasive problem through the years. We are looking further at the issues of online grooming and exploitation, which are escalating. In a complication, more teenagers themselves are involved in that exploitation. It is more complicated to identify where people are being coerced and where they are actually criminals committing these crimes.
Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Reform)
It is amazing, staggering, that Labour MPs can come here today and welcome an inquiry, yet when they were given the chance, they all voted against one. These girls—the victims of the Pakistani grooming gangs—were kidnapped, abused, drugged and raped, and when they reached out for help, everybody ignored them. It is little wonder that they have no faith in the system. But they can regain faith if the Home Secretary agrees with me and appoints Maggie Oliver as chair of the inquiry.
Yvette Cooper
I say to the hon. Member that child sexual exploitation and abuse are some of the most vile crimes that our country faces. What Baroness Casey’s report sets out in some detail, over 17 pages, is that there has been report after report after review after review but so many of the recommendations were never implemented, so concerns that were raised at the time of the Rotherham inquiry about issues around ethnicity, lack of information-sharing and lack of protection for children were simply not acted on. Baroness Casey herself says:
“If we’d got this right years ago—seeing these girls as children raped rather than ‘wayward teenagers’…then I doubt we’d be in this place now.”
The hon. Member was a member of the previous Government, who failed to do that. I hope that he agrees that successive Governments and agencies across the country have failed to act. We need to ensure that there is a proper independent inquiry, as well as, most crucially of all, action by police in the operations that will bring perpetrators to justice and put them behind bars.
Patricia Ferguson (Glasgow West) (Lab)
I thank my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary for her statement. One of the questions running through Baroness Casey’s audit is “Why?”—not just why that type of offending has been allowed to grow unchecked in our society, but why people are driven to commit such vile crimes. Can the Home Secretary assure me that the Government will commission serious, thorough and considered research into the drivers of group-based child sexual exploitation, including looking at all the issues around ethnicity and age? Will those findings be shared with the devolved Administrations who, as we have heard, have not been exempt from these issues?
Yvette Cooper
Yes, I can say to my hon. Friend that we accept that recommendation in Baroness Casey’s report and we will commission research into the drivers of child sexual exploitation and, more widely, violence against women and girls, so that we have stronger evidence to keep children safe.
Sir Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)
Bradford and Keighley taxis operate in Skipton and south Craven—there have been some horrific cases in that area. Will the Home Secretary confirm that the inquiry will not be restricted to Bradford and the bigger conurbations? In the UK, we have a crisis in our inquiry system: they all take too long. The covid inquiry is still ongoing, which is an absolute scandal. Can she accelerate the timings? Will she give serious consideration to this public inquiry being held in the north of England?
Yvette Cooper
I agree that there are challenges with inquiries that can take a long time, which means that victims and survivors, or those affected by the inquiry, wait a very long time for answers. That is why it is critical that we introduce and implement recommendations from previous inquiries—that we get on with it and strengthen police operations now to put perpetrators behind bars. I can also tell the right hon. Gentleman that we will not restrict where the inquiry goes or where the commission chooses to investigate.
Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)
I welcome Baroness Casey’s audit and the Government’s instigation of the national inquiry, which must leave no stone unturned, lead to convictions and lead to perpetrators and anybody complicit being put behind bars where, as far as I am concerned, they can rot. It is also important that this most serious of issues demands serious and considered conduct from people in this place, including not misrepresenting what happens here. Will the Home Secretary confirm that if the reasoned amendment referred to by the Leader of the Opposition had passed, it would not have led to a national inquiry; it would have blocked child protection measures, and it weaponised child rape to go after clicks—[Interruption.]
Yvette Cooper
We want action to be taken across the board to make sure that children are protected and that the recommendations are introduced. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that the Opposition voted against is an opportunity to implement two of the recommendations in Baroness Casey’s audit. It is right that we implement those changes to strengthen the protection of children and to keep young people safe.
Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)
I welcome a lot of what the Home Secretary has said today; she keeps referring to institutional failures. In Bradford in 2020, a little girl, Star Hobson, was murdered by her mother’s partner. Evidence came to light from neighbours and social services that the case was dismissed because it involved a lesbian couple and people feared being accused of being homophobic. I have also had issues in my constituency since the last election where social workers have been worried about the other labels that they may get; they have a tick box and leave the child at the bottom. I ask the Home Secretary to consider that institutional failure where people are afraid to offend one group or another, and they often lose sight of the fact that the child is the most important part of the care service.
Yvette Cooper
Crime is crime, and the safety of children should always be paramount, whatever the circumstances, and we must always pursue the evidence. That is why the mantra around policing is to pursue the evidence “without fear or favour”, and that is the standard that British policing has long applied. That is the approach we always have to take to children’s safety, wherever issues or concerns are raised.
Jas Athwal (Ilford South) (Lab)
I put on record my thanks to Baroness Casey and the Home Secretary—the first Home Secretary in 16 years to come here with an independent review. These girls, now women, were abused, traumatised and then retraumatised by a system that did little to protect them or help them get justice. We should always put the lives and safety of young girls before any political concerns, which is why I welcome today’s decision. Will the Home Secretary lay out how predators, and those who denied victims justice, will be held accountable following this inquiry?
Yvette Cooper
We must ensure that recommendations are implemented. One conclusion in the Baroness Casey audit states:
“The timeline set out above—”
that is the history of failed reports in the past—
“shows a pattern of case after case of offending that is prosecuted, reviewed and then recommendations for improvement made and repeated, but not followed through. We become so used to hearing about these issues that they become more about justifications for failures rather than problems that need to be fixed.”
We must ensure that these problems are fixed.
Gregory Stafford (Farnham and Bordon) (Con)
I welcome the Home Secretary’s statement that those who are convicted of such crimes will not be able to take part in the asylum system, and I suggest that she may want to extend that to all crimes against the person. The question that my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch) asked was this: will the Home Secretary ensure that no fallacious human rights claims can be made that mean that these people cannot be deported if convicted of these crimes?
Yvette Cooper
We are strengthening the safeguards in the asylum system. The system that we inherited was too weak and not strong enough to ensure not only that the rules are respected and enforced, but to deal particularly with issues of criminality and public risk. We are strengthening those safeguards, including the law around sexual offences, and we are looking particularly at issues around the way article 8 is being interpreted. We are also strengthening public protection arrangements. We are bringing in new arrangements to ensure that, should any issues be raised by the police or others about any safety risk or anybody in the asylum system, joint public protection agreements and arrangements between the police and Immigration Enforcement, people can be kept safe.
Laura Kyrke-Smith (Aylesbury) (Lab)
I welcome the clarity and focus on action that the Home Secretary has brought to the House. This morning I spoke to the father of a young woman in my constituency who was the victim of child sexual exploitation. He thinks that this is the right way forward, but his concern, and mine, is for those victims and survivors whose trauma will be opened up again by the process. As he put it:
“When you open Pandora’s box, you’ve got to have the tools to deal with whatever comes out.”
Will the Home Secretary say more about the tools that she will put in place to support the survivors at the heart of this issue?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point. Too often, victims and survivors have been asked to tell their story, often to multiple agencies, and then have seen no action, which simply strengthens the distress that they feel. Seven thousand victims and survivors gave evidence to the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. As we draw up the arrangements for the national inquiry, we will work closely, as will the safeguarding Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips), to keep victims and survivors in our minds. We must ensure that they have support, and that the point my hon. Friend has raised on behalf of her constituent, and for the victims and their families, is taken seriously.
Ayoub Khan (Birmingham Perry Barr) (Ind)
I welcome the Home Secretary’s statement, specifically about allowing the NCA to head the operation, with partner agencies, and working across all regions. As a barrister, I have spoken to many NCA officers and law enforcement officers, and one consistent criticism is that they do not have enough resources. This will be an enormous investigation, up and down the country, so will the Home Secretary assure the House that the resources that those officers will need to complete the investigation will not be limited?
Yvette Cooper
We have already provided some additional resources for policing, so that officers will be able to undertake the assessment and identification of cases that were closed but need to be reopened, or where other lines of inquiry need to be followed up. The hon. Gentleman will know that the National Crime Agency already does immensely important work through Operation Stovewood around South Yorkshire, and through its work on online child abuse. We need to bring all the different programmes of work closer together, involving both the National Crime Agency and the new centre for public protection that we are setting up, which will be about setting new standards across the country and rolling out the national operating model that all forces can then follow.
Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)
I commend the Home Secretary for the dignified way in which she gave her statement. I associate myself with her apology to the victims and survivors of sexual exploitation and grooming gangs for past failures. I welcome the Government having accepted the recommendations of Baroness Casey’s rapid audit and the announcement of a national criminal operation to pursue and convict perpetrators. Justice for victims of these horrific crimes must always be our top priority. West Yorkshire police have taken a proactive approach to securing justice for victims. As recently as January this year, eight men were given jail sentences of nearly 58 years for multiple sexual offences against two children in Keighley in the 1990s. Will she join me in commending the work of West Yorkshire police in bringing the perpetrators of those vile crimes to justice?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right to highlight the work of West Yorkshire police. They have done pioneering work to find new ways to identify victims who may be at risk and to summon evidence where there are repeat missing cases, and they have been forensic and determined in pursuit of action. I commend the work of the assistant chief constable. Learning from the work that the police have done, we want to make Baroness Casey’s recommendation a central part of the national criminal operation.
Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst (Solihull West and Shirley) (Con)
The sexual exploitation of vulnerable children in this country is a stain upon our society, and the victims want not just the truth out but transparency. With that in mind, will the Home Secretary confirm whether the Government asked Baroness Casey to change any elements of her report—yes or no?
Yvette Cooper
This is Baroness Casey’s independent report. The whole point about asking somebody like Baroness Casey to do an independent report is that we know that they will come to their own conclusions, not anybody else’s. As the hon. Gentleman will see, the report has Baroness Casey’s forthright style and conclusions. In her evidence tomorrow at the Home Affairs Committee, I think she will make it clear that these are her conclusions.
Dan Aldridge (Weston-super-Mare) (Lab)
I pay tribute to victims, survivors and campaigners. I am 40 years old and it has taken being that age for me to be able to talk about some of the abuse that happened when I was a child. As one of the countless victims living with the impact of grooming, sexual and psychological abuse, I found it galling to watch Tory and Reform Members who never once lifted a finger—[Interruption.] No, you didn’t—not one finger lifted.
Yvette Cooper
I thank my hon. Friend for speaking out about his experiences. To speak out as a victim of child abuse in that way is immensely difficult, and I think everyone should listen to what victims and survivors have to say. I thank him for speaking out, because by doing so he provides strength and inspiration to other victims and survivors across the country, and I pay tribute to him for doing so. He is right that this should be something that everyone can agree on, because it is about the protection of children and the tackling of serious crime. I hope all of us can do that with respect and together.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I hope something else we can all agree on is our admiration for the former Labour MP Ann Cryer, who exposed what was going on back in 2003, which was only five years into a 13-year-long Labour Government, and was disgracefully smeared as a racist for doing so. Let us belatedly make an apology to her and thank her for her courage.
Yvette Cooper
I do thank my former honourable Friend Ann Cryer, because she did speak out and stand up for children who were being abused. It is because of that that I recognise, as part of the response I made to the 2022 child abuse inquiry and again today, that this has been a historic failure over very many decades. Just as I recognise that historic failure, which everyone should recognise, I hope the right hon. Gentleman will persuade those on his Front Bench also to recognise the historic failure and to take some responsibility. It is really sad that the Leader of the Opposition did not choose to respond to, or join in, the historic apology in 2022, which was a cross-party apology involving the former Home Secretary. I am really sorry that she chose not to do so today.
Jon Pearce (High Peak) (Lab)
I very much welcome the Home Secretary calling a national inquiry. I am particularly taken with Baroness Casey’s first recommendation that children must be seen as children. I am extremely concerned by the number of cases she has identified that were dropped because those children were seen as consenting to sex with their perpetrators. Will the Home Secretary reassure me that those cases will be opened and looked at immediately and that we do not have to wait for the outcome of the national inquiry?
Yvette Cooper
I can tell my hon. Friend that we are working with the Lord Chancellor on taking forward this recommendation now and not waiting for any further local inquiry. Baroness Casey is really clear that the adultification of children, treating them as consenting to something into which they were coerced and in which they were exploited, lies at the heart of a lot of the institutional failure to take this crime seriously. That is why we need to change the law, but we also need to change attitudes, because some of the cases that Baroness Casey refers to are recent, and that cannot go on.
Jim Allister (North Antrim) (TUV)
The Home Secretary refers to this inquiry as a national inquiry, but it is not, is it? The inquiry’s terms of reference and scope will exclude concern about grooming and organised sexual exploitation in Northern Ireland, whether by foreign nationals, paramilitary groups or others. Is that less important to this Government? Will the legislative change increasing the statutory rape age to 16 apply across the whole United Kingdom?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. and learned Member will understand that Home Office responsibilities around policing and crime cover England and Wales. The Safeguarding Minister will be following up with the devolved Administrations, and it will be for them to decide how they want to take these issues forward, including in Northern Ireland. The Lord Chancellor will consult in the normal way with devolved Administrations on changes to the law.
Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
Any and every instance of child sexual exploitation should shame all of us, but I think what so many of us found particularly horrific about the grooming gangs scandal was the fact that those crimes continued to be perpetrated because of a failure to act by stakeholders and agencies that had completely indefensible preconceived notions about the victims they were speaking to. As such, I welcome the Government following the evidence, not the politics—first in appointing Baroness Casey to conduct the review, and then in ensuring that we do not shy away from a national inquiry when she has called for one. Will the Home Secretary ensure that the inquiry has all the powers it needs to compel any and every stakeholder who potentially played a part in walking on by from this scandal to take part and give evidence, and will she legislate where necessary so that anyone who is shown to have played a part in those victims not getting the justice they deserved to begin with is accountable before the law?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right that those attitudes towards teenage girls—towards children—and treating them as adults still persist. Baroness Casey quotes a serious case review of a case involving a teenager online. She was just 12 or 13 years old, and was being drawn into the most explicit and abusive chatrooms and pornographic sites online. This was treated as somehow being the child’s choice, even though there was evidence of exploitation and crime taking place. We have to ensure that we do more to protect our teenagers, and we will bring in the mandatory duty to report to strengthen the law in that area.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call Dr Ben Spencer to ask the final question.
Dr Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con)
I thank the Home Secretary for her statement, and for changing her mind on the need for a national inquiry. She has had the Casey report for the past 10 days. Could she lay out what evidence in that report was most persuasive in changing her mind, or, if she reached that conclusion independent of the report, which factors led her to do so?
Yvette Cooper
That is an important question. I undertook to this House in January that I would look further at how to ensure that local investigations had the powers they needed to compel witnesses or evidence. That was raised with us by Members of this House, but also by mayors, to ensure that those investigations could properly get to the truth. We pursued that and looked at other powers—those in the Local Government Act, inspection powers and so on. All those powers had complexities attached to them, so we asked Baroness Casey to look at this issue, as well as the responses we got from local authorities. We looked at that evidence, but also asked Baroness Casey to look at it as well and make final recommendations. That is why we have agreed with Baroness Casey’s recommendation to have a national inquiry in place.