Child Sexual Exploitation: Casey Report

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Wednesday 18th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, as my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott said last week in response to the Government’s previous U-turn on winter fuel payments, we are pleased that the Government have finally listened to the wishes of the British public and agreed to hold a full national inquiry into grooming gangs.

The abhorrence of the crimes committed by these gangs is beyond belief. It is vividly apparent that the victims have repeatedly been let down. The audit by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, lays bare the scale of the institutional failure across the country. I pay tribute to all those survivors who were systematically ignored by authorities for fear of being branded racist. Those who have come forward to whistleblow and share their harrowing stories have demonstrated unbelievable bravery, such as the survivor Fiona Goddard, who was exploited and abused by an Asian grooming gang at the age of 14 when living in care in Bradford. She was led to believe that her abusers cared for her, before they plied her with drugs and continuously raped her. I cannot imagine the horrors experienced by the many thousands of children groomed by these gangs. I am particularly concerned—I raised the matter with the Minister at Questions earlier today—about what steps the Government will take to ensure that the victims are at the centre of their response.

We must be under no illusions. This is not a historic sexual abuse story; these vile crimes are still being perpetrated. Young girls are still, to this very day, being groomed and sexually exploited by gangs, as the report by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, makes abundantly clear.

The fact that these gangs continue to operate, with young girls still not being believed and their voices still not being heard, makes it even more difficult to understand why the Government have taken so long to listen to what my right honourable friend the leader of the Opposition has been saying since January. The Conservatives gave the Prime Minister three opportunities in the other place to back a full national inquiry, and Labour Members voted against these measures on all three occasions.

Not only that, but Government Ministers repeatedly opposed such an inquiry. The Secretary of State for Education accused those who called for an inquiry “bandwagon jumpers” who “don’t care about children”. The Leader of the House of Commons claimed that the issue of grooming gangs was a “dog whistle”. The Minister for Safeguarding rejected an appeal by Oldham Council for a national inquiry last October, and in April this year announced just five local inquiries. Indeed, the Minister here said on 22 April, in response to a question that I posed to him, that:

“We could certainly have a national inquiry, as the noble Lord has mentioned, but this Government’s judgment is that we know what the problem is”.—[Official Report, 22/4/25; col. 624.]


Even the Prime Minister himself said that anyone calling for an inquiry was jumping on a far-right bandwagon and repeatedly opposed holding such a national inquiry. He has, of course, now changed his mind once again.

Can the Minister explain why the Government opposed a national inquiry for so long, and why they have now done such a complete about-face on this issue? Surely now is the time for the Government to apologise for repeatedly making false claims about those who have been calling for this national inquiry since January.

I place on record my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, for her no-nonsense, hard-hitting and thorough audit. Her candour and tenacity are exemplary. She has not shied away from highlighting the fact that these child rape gangs were largely comprised of Pakistani men, a point that all too many have previously been scared to make. She also highlights faults in the available datasets. As the report states, the complex organised child abuse dataset includes all child sexual abuse and exploitation that is committed by two or more perpetrators, and this includes familial abuse, child-on-child abuse and institutional abuse. It is therefore difficult to ascertain the true scale of grooming gangs.

There are 12 recommendations presented in the audit. I look forward to hearing the detail of how and when the Government will take them forward.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I pay tribute to the victims and the whistleblowers from the police and other authorities for their bravery and absolute consistency in continuing to fight for their cause.

I am sorry that the Conservative spokesman has taken the line that he did. I am afraid that from these Benches we have a different standpoint. It was really disappointing on Monday to hear the leader of the Opposition attack the current Government when this applies to Governments of all parties over recent decades, including my own, but especially the Conservative Government who commissioned Professor Jay’s IICSA report, published a response but then did nothing. Surely it is better for all of us to come to this in humility and admit that, time after time, politicians failed to listen. This is not just about parliamentarians; it is about elected mayors, councillors, assemblies and combined authorities too. We did not just fail to listen but we all failed to act.

The noble Baroness, Lady Casey, said that now is the time to right wrongs, and that is correct. The victims and the whistleblowers, even when reported in the news and documentaries, have had to listen time and again to promises of action but nothing changing. It is refreshing that the Statement says that the Government will act on all the noble Baroness’s recommendations. But we know that this promise has been made before in response to complex, long-standing and shameful incidents over the years, and I am sure that some still continue. As Professor Jay said in her IICSA report, we lie to ourselves if we think that child sexual abuse and exploitation are not happening now.

We are seeing similar issues with the slowness of the infected blood compensation scheme, the Post Office Horizon compensation scheme and the Windrush scheme. Will your Lordships’ House hear that the inquiry will be set up swiftly and will be fully funded, including support for victims, as has been promised for the other schemes I have just mentioned, but which has not always appeared? Will the inquiry also draw evidence from the previous reports and reviews, so that the evidence it takes will build on what is already known? As I mentioned at Oral Questions, there are two reasons for this. First, it is much less traumatic for the victims and whistleblowers, many of whom have had to give the same evidence many times, each time revictimising them. Secondly, that should ensure a shorter evidence period of the inquiry; as the Statement says, there is an urgent need for action and accountability, whether for the perpetrators or the organisations that did not protect these children when they were raped and groomed, including councils, the police, the judiciary, social workers and more.

Will victims, including whistleblowers, be supported properly, right from the start, and not be revictimised? How long will it take to review the convictions that some of these young people, mainly girls, received, because they were perceived as complicit and able to give consent when they were plainly children? What steps will the Government take, in the light of the noble Baroness’s audit review, to ask councils, the police, the judiciary, social workers and others to review their working practices now? While the inquiry’s future report and recommendations are important, it is evident that there is enough for those organisations to reflect and change their practice now, in light of this audit review.

The Government have promised a form of mandatory reporting, as well as a Bill on the duty of candour, or Hillsborough law. Can the Minister say when we will see them in Parliament? Both are urgent to prevent this happening again in the future.

The recommendations on appropriate data collection and data sharing are also vital and, I am afraid, long overdue. The use of the Smith algorithm in West Yorkshire sounds helpful in identifying people possibly in scope as victims and survivors. Will it be rolled out elsewhere, given West Yorkshire’s positive experience?

The noble Baroness’s report proposes research into taxi drivers for group-based child sexual exploitation, including online. Unlike the monks, teachers and children’s workers involved in other group child sexual exploitation, taxi drivers are below the regulatory radar, other than the licence for their taxis. So will the Government ensure that statutory standards for taxi drivers will be brought in, to end “out of area” taxis plying their trade in places many miles away, where they are not on the radar of the local authority in which they are trying to work?

Will the Government publish a plan for communication to the wider public? This is a highly sensitive topic for young people, families and communities. In particular, will the Government work with faith groups and community groups? The noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, rightly pointed out during Oral Questions that most Muslims are absolutely horrified by the behaviour of small groups of truly evil men, but it will be important for these communities to understand what they need to do to prevent it from ever happening again.

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

I am grateful to both Front-Bench speakers for their contributions and questions. I will try, as ever, to address those issues.

Let me go straight to the heart of the challenge from the noble Lord, Lord Davies, to the Government regarding accepting the inquiry recommendations. When we came to office last year, we looked at the IICSA recommendations, which had been ignored for two years by the previous Government. We have accepted and have begun to implement the vast majority of the IICSA recommendations. Some are still being examined, but the broad direction of travel is to accept. In January this year, we also commissioned the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, to whom I pay full tribute, to produce a report on emerging trends and how the four or five major potential inquiries in towns that we are familiar with were progressing, and whether we needed some national co-ordination on those issues. She entered that with an open mind and has come back and made 12 recommendations, including the Government producing national frameworking standards as part of an inquiry to support the local inquiries that were commissioned and taking place.

I regard that not as a U-turn but as a positive contribution from an independent colleague of ours, the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. The 12 recommendations have come forward in a way that we can make further progress to tackle this horrendous issue which, as the noble Lord mentioned extremely well, impacts on victims across the country—there have been 500,000 victims of child abuse and 100,000 victims of sexual exploitation. It is beholden on this House to look at those recommendations seriously, and we have accepted the need for that national inquiry.

Both the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies, mentioned how the inquiry will be established. I said earlier at Oral Questions that we will be bringing that forward at an early opportunity; we have to appoint a chair and set terms of reference. We brought the report straight to this House and the House of Commons this week; we will do that in relatively short order and I will report back to this House when that is complete.

The noble Lord, Lord Davies, also mentioned victims. We want to ensure that victims are central to this and that their testimony and experience are brought to the inquiry. We will be giving a mandate to the chair, whoever he or she may be, to bring forward that support for victims in due course—a point mentioned also by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton.

Since the election, more than 800 grooming gang cases originally dropped by the police have been reopened, and the child sexual exploitation police task force has increased arrests by more than 50% in the past year. So there is action on the ground as well as progress on the recommendations.

It may help Liberal Democrat Members and His Majesty’s Opposition if I run quickly through the 12 recommendations. One is the inquiry, which we have accepted. On mandatory charges of rape, we will begin an immediate consultation with the CPS and the police to develop legislative change on that recommendation. On the national police operation, we will actively increase policing and statutory partners to design an operation that will take criminals to task in a much more strategic and energetic way. The national inquiry is a recommendation we have accepted. The noble Baroness mentioned reviewing the criminal convictions of victims; we will be legislating in the police and crime Bill, which has just completed its passage in the House of Commons, to put in place a scheme to disregard those convictions. When legislation has been passed, that will occur. The mandatory collection of ethnicity data is an extremely important point that was raised in Oral Questions. We will undertake that and will commission it to begin immediately for police forces, and we will be issuing guidance.

Mandatory information sharing between statutory agencies is a provision in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, currently before Parliament. We are making it unequivocally clear that information must be shared. The recommendation from the noble Baroness on unique reference numbers for children is also in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill before the House currently. The recommendation from the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, on research into drivers of group-based child sexual exploitation will begin immediately in the Home Office. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, mentioned taxi licensing, and the Department for Transport is committed to working as quickly as possible to consider the options the noble Baroness brought forward. So the Government will be taking forward all 12 recommendations, and I hope that will be welcomed across the House.

I should also just say, because I am slightly confused— I hope the House will bear with me—that the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, has been pressing this Government to implement the IICSA recommendations and has been asking questions about the IICSA recommendations on child sexual grooming and on a range of other matters, all of which, I have informed this House, even as recently as Questions today, will be in the Crime and Policing Bill before these Houses of Parliament.

The noble Lord does not have the opportunity to address this now, but maybe he can think about this, because not one hour ago His Majesty’s Official Opposition in the House of Commons voted against that Bill at Third Reading and, in doing so, voted against the measures to implement the IICSA report. His Opposition Members of Parliament walked through a Lobby voting against those measures not one hour ago, and not just those measures but measures on retail crime, on prevention of terrorism and on a whole range of things in the Crime and Policing Bill, which will come to this House of Lords very shortly for Second Reading. He has an opportunity, at Second Reading in a few weeks’ time, to think through his position on this and reflect on whether his party, his leader, his official shadow Home Secretary can continue to support that opposition to the Crime and Policing Bill measures, because those measures are the very things that he stood up, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to support this Government in doing. I will just let him reflect on that. And it was not just his party—the Reform Party voted against the Third Reading of the Crime and Policing Bill.

I am not sure what this is coming to, but these measures are important, and I mention them today because the grooming gang recommendations which we have accepted here today will be implemented in the Crime and Policing Bill. If the noble Lord continues his position of voting against that Bill at Third Reading, they risk not becoming law. Also, he has not supported the measures that I thought he was supporting, on child sexual exploitation, that we put in the Crime and Policing Bill to meet the IICSA requirements on things such as mandatory reporting. I just put that before the House because it is hot off the press and I think it is worthy of reflection.

However, I give the noble Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, a commitment that the 12 recommendations before the Government from the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, will be implemented. We will, as we have done, implement the vast majority of the IICSA recommendations and will be looking at the ones that are still outstanding to see how we can implement them. We will continue to press down, through prosecution and through police activity, on grooming gangs to ensure that we tackle those. I commend the Statement to the House, and I am happy to answer further questions on it in detail.