Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing the update as promised to Parliament earlier in the year—it is refreshing and a sign of how seriously this Government are taking group-based child sexual exploitation. From the Liberal Democrat Benches, we also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, for her excellent work.

I start by thanking the whistleblowers and victims, who are still speaking up about this. The speed and success of the actions forecast in this Statement will be judged to have satisfied their demands for justice, and should change policing forever, so that we never end up in this position again.

The national inquiry and national police operation must not just be survivor-centred but must always check back with survivors about process. On many, many occasions, your Lordships’ House has highlighted other victims of appalling circumstances, inquiries and compensation schemes, where the Government of the day paid the right lip service but the reality has left those survivors getting caught up in the bureaucracy that definitely is not survivor-centred. I think particularly of the Hillsborough tragedy, the Manchester bombings and the Windrush scandal, as well as the scandals of infected blood, the Grenfell Tower fire and the Horizon postmasters.

The update on the national police operation is encouraging, but there seems to be one glaring hole: all the detail is about training senior and specialist staff. There is no mention of the front-line staff, including control or police officers on the beat. Their lack of training in years gone by meant that the police missed the obvious first signs and ignored whistleblowers. This has also been a problem in other areas, such as in recognising stalking and domestic abuse. Can the Minister say what is planned for those on the front line, because, without their involvement, cases may not even make it to the high level specialist units?

The update on the Tackling Organised Exploitation programme—TOEX—is also helpful, including the details of the rollout. We on the Liberal Democrat Benches understand that things cannot change overnight, but can the Minister tell your Lordships’ House when every police force will be TOEX trained and funded?

I will briefly make two other points. It is good to see the commitment to improving ethnicity data. The Statement says that this will be used for all cases with child sexual exploitation suspects, but is that not too late as well? Data needs to be consistently collected across the board. We therefore welcome the inquiry considering the intersection with ethnicity, race and culture, as well as safeguarding.

Finally, while it is right that the focus of this Statement is on the horrific gang-based child sexual abuse, as the Minister knows, the vast majority of child sexual abuse is hidden from view. NSPCC data estimates that one in 20 children face child sexual abuse, accounting for probably close to 90% of child sexual abuse across the board. The average age of a victim finally finding the courage to volunteer information about what happened to them is, shockingly, about 20 years after the event. What will the Government do to ensure that all adults—parents, teachers and especially doctors—are able to identify the signs early on and report it, so that this serious scourge can be reduced too?

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the questions, and the broad welcome for our measures, from both His Majesty’s loyal Opposition and the Liberal Democrat Benches. I too echo the thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, for her work and focus on these issues.

The noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Lochiel, rightly pressed me on the final stages of the appointment of the chair of the inquiry. I reassurance him that we are working at pace to do that. He knows that it took two years to get Alexis Jay into post. We are trying to do this as a matter of urgency. We want to make sure that the victims and survivors are consulted, and we are undertaking formal measures, as is outlined in the Statement, to ensure that they are involved in the process. That is similarly the case for the terms of reference. I am hopeful that we will be able to bring forward proposals to both Houses of Parliament, in relatively short order, to finalise those issues. It is the Government’s intention to establish the inquiry as a matter of urgency.

I cannot give the noble Lord too much detail today on the violence against women and girls strategy, because that will be developed and then announced and put before both Houses of Parliament in due course. I assure him that tackling violence against women and girls is a key manifesto commitment, as is the strategy. The Minister responsible directly in the Home Office, my honourable friend Jess Phillips, has a very keen interest in making sure that the strategy has a real impact on violence against women and girls. I expect to make a Statement in this House, alongside the Minister in the Commons, at some point in the relatively near future.

It is also important that the noble Lord noted—this also goes to one of the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, made—that Operation Beaconport, which we announced today, has reopened an additional 1,273 cases to be reviewed now. Some 216 priority cases of historical abuse are being reviewed. As the Statement outlines, we are bringing together partners and police under the National Crime Agency to look at these issues and to put some energy into this. That will be trialled later this month, with further announcements, I hope, from the National Crime Agency and policing partners on how they will deal with those issues on the ground.

I think that partly answers a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, but we also have the great involvement of victims and survivors. We need to look at the training issues that she mentioned, and the policing partners will review that in due course. The ethnicity data is extremely important and, as the Statement outlines, we are trying to move that forward at pace. Between that and the extra resource we have announced this week of more than £400,000, on top of the money already allocated, we have a reasonable initiative with which to take forward these issues.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, also made the valid point that the Statement relates to grooming gangs and particular problems and challenges that have arisen because of them; the report of the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, focuses its direction of travel on that. However, there are also many other issues to do with child sexual abuse that the Government need to grapple with and bring forward some solutions to.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is aware of the Crime and Policing Bill, which will come to this House after the Conference Recess. A number of measures in the Bill will ensure that we meet the Alexis Jay recommendations, including on mandatory reporting. If the Bill achieves support from both Houses, there will be additional new legislative measures to improve performance on mandatory reporting, as well as new powers on tackling AI generation of child sexual abuse images.

It should also never be forgotten that the Home Office itself spends in the region of £60 million per year on preventing child sexual abuse, as well as on supporting victims and bringing perpetrators to justice. The Statement is therefore an update on where we are; it is not the end product. If noble Lords look at the Crime and Policing Bill, the work the Home Office is doing and the announcements in the Statement, they will see that big movement is being made to tackle this issue in an appropriate and effective way.

[Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)]

My Lords, when the Government first announced the national inquiry, they said that it would be an innovative—and, I thought, very interesting—new model, which would enable individual local investigations to be overseen by a national commission with statutory powers. However, this Statement, which I appreciate is not the end point, now seems to refer to a standard overarching inquiry which will identify priority areas for investigation and report the findings at a local and national level. The main body of work seems to be being carried out by the chair and whoever they may have to support them. I might be missing something, but this is exactly how IICSA operated. There is nothing wrong with that—it did a great job—but I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify whether there is, in fact, any difference in terms of structure between this inquiry and the one that went before it? As it stands, the only thing I can see is the introduction of a time limit, and that is a very good thing, but it is perhaps a little easier to do in this instance, given the great body of evidence we have already amassed over many years in this area.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her question and the work she has done in this area. She will remember that in January, the Home Secretary announced a £5 million fund for local inquiries, and we are encouraging any local authority to bid for that resource if it still wishes to. The terms of reference for a national inquiry will be set when the chair is appointed. We want to consult and involve the chair in how that operation works and how we get the best information, knowledge and inquiries at a local level. I anticipate that the chair will be able to formulate the view of the inquiry’s operation in relatively short order once appointed, and that I will come back and update this House on how local and national issues are intertwined. There is that £5 million fund, and local authorities are currently developing examinations of their performance because of that fund. I am hopeful that, although we are moving to a national-based inquiry, the lessons at a local level will not be lost and, instead, will be intertwined into national conclusions from the future chair when appointed.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for the Statement, which is necessarily looking into things that have already happened. To pick up on the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton—and I know that I shall stray a little from the Home Office’s brief—does my noble friend agree with me that it is critical that schools are places where children are able to use their voice in their own advocacy, that children’s rights are necessarily respected, and that all schools have a sense of what trauma-informed practice looks like? Beyond the punishment of offenders, we still have young people, victims and survivors, who will be in schools, and we need to make sure that those are places where all members of staff in schools have the time, space, training and empathy to be able to understand what has happened and to help young people move forward.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

My noble friend tempts me to stray into areas that are the responsibility of the Department for Education, but the points that she has made are well made. We need to have supportive mechanisms, training and the ability to identify individuals. Critically—and this is a Home Office responsibility—we are putting mandatory reporting into play in the Crime and Policing Bill, which again requires training and support for teachers particularly and those individuals who come into contact with children to ensure that children have the confidence to report and get over—and, if those reports take place, to ensure that individuals have a mandatory statutory duty to report that to the police for further investigation. The points she makes are very well made, and I will refer those comments to my colleagues in the Department for Education.

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, put our record our thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, for the work she has done to date and for the further work I hope she will do in future.

I follow up on the comments made by the noble Baroness opposite on not only schools, but on youth workers and services in particular. Detached youth workers are in a prime position to befriend and seek the confidence of young people who may have been victims of grooming gangs. It overlaps with education, but it is really important that we do not silo things into Home Office affairs and education.

Often, victims are not only young people but vulnerable people. That is what I have seen from my experience of working in youth services for the last 30 years. People who were grooming were picking on people because they were vulnerable. One vulnerability is people fleeing domestic violence. Often, you will see that people are away from where they used to live, and in some communities they have been very visible—that is, people can see they are from outside. I seek assurances from the inquiry on the group-based gangs that we will also seek out working alongside refuges for women in particular to see whether they can bring victims forward. I am concerned that in some communities, because of the issue around honour, women will want to remain silent because they just want to put that horrific past behind them. They also have to be brought forward to be able to tell their story and hold those perpetrators to account.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes an extremely valuable contribution. I agree with him that we need to look not just at teaching staff but youth staff and other contacts within the church and community that come into contact with young people. The purpose of all that is to give victims the confidence to be able to talk about those things. The mandatory reporting measures that we have put in the Crime and Policing Bill will make it a responsibility for individuals to then report that to the police for further investigation.

The noble Lord makes a very important point about confidence in bringing forward historic sexual abuse issues, particularly honour-based sexual abuse issues. He will know that the operation I mentioned earlier, Beaconport, is looking at historic abuse. Over 1,200 cases are now being surfaced. They will be investigated. There are 216 priority cases within that. If there are further cases to be brought forward, they should be reported for further investigation of a historic nature. My colleagues in the National Crime Agency will be detailing more about that, because that is an operational matter for them, later this month.