Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

Lord Robathan Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, for that support, and for her support for the Government not reinvigorating or starting again a national inquiry. She makes an extremely important point about victims. Victims are victims and, whatever has happened, they are being traumatised and have been traumatised, and will carry that with them for many years, if not for life. Therefore, the Government recognise that we need to support victims and survivors. We will look at the issue of compensation in slower time now, but we are doing that. We also recognise the significant impact that funding for support services can play in helping victims. The Home Office, my department, is continuing to provide funding to voluntary organisations for survivors of child sexual abuse. We will continue to work across government to ensure that we put a proper victims package in place to help support them.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, I compliment the Minister, unusually, on his balanced approach, which is commendable. I also agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong—again, I do not do so that often—that this should not be a political football. But it has to be said that the Prime Minister, yesterday or the day before, made it a political football by saying that anybody who criticised him was being right-wing. I do not know if the Minister has read the article in the Times today on an interview with Andrew Norfolk, who investigated this scandal and exposed it some dozen years ago. In it he defends the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, when he was DPP, and we should note that absolutely. The article also reports Andrew Norfolk as saying that,

“the national inquiry shied away from investigating the causation of grooming gangs, ‘probably for not dissimilar reasons why left-wing academics still attack me … It is very difficult to talk about this stuff without being accused of being Islamophobic’”.

He then adds that,

“everybody is still too scared”.

I do not think we should have a seven-year inquiry but the Government need to focus very much on the idea that the grooming gangs were not generally white English people, as everybody knows. The Government need to look at that closely.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Lord has said what he said. I have heard it and do not agree with much of it. The Prime Minister has a strong record, as DPP and as a political leader, of tackling this issue, and a strong record of supporting my honourable friend Jess Phillips, who has a strong record of tackling this issue. Why this is being politicised is that some people are using it to attack the Government for a range of reasons. I want to focus on the issue at hand, and that is how we prevent child sexual abuse. The measures in the recommendations of the report to date will be looked at. We have already said what we are going to try to implement, and that is the important thing to focus on.