Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend and for her persistent campaigning on this issue. It is important that we focus on the issue: how do we better protect children and survivors, how do we give them victim support and how do we prevent future criminal actions by individuals, whatever their race or ethnicity? We must also seek to prosecute individuals, whatever their race or ethnicity.

While I can make points about the review commissioned by the noble Baroness, Lady May, the seven years afterwards, the response and what has happened since then, I want to try to look forward. That means taking forward the three recommendations that we have agreed to and looking at the work we have done since July on the child sexual exploitation police task force. That was established by the last Government. We have now put some energy into the acceleration of its activity and saw a 25% increase in arrests around child sexual exploitation between July and September of last year.

There is much to do. I appreciate that history is worth looking at, and there are lessons for us all—including me, as I was a Home Office Minister a long time ago, in 2009-10. My hope is that we can use this to find common ground to tackle the issue. In doing so, let us make sure that we protect children and bring perpetrators to justice.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, when I last tried to introduce a mandatory reporting duty for child abuse, in an amendment on Report to the Serious Crime Bill, on 28 October 2014—a long time ago—the Minister at the time, the noble Lord, Lord Bates, responded by announcing the inquiry, which later became the IICSA inquiry established by the noble Baroness, Lady May, as well as a public consultation. However, he said:

“Research is inconclusive in determining whether mandatory reporting regimes help, hinder or … make no difference to child safeguarding outcomes”.—[Official Report, 28/10/14; col. 1083.]


He also said that the duty to report might “divert” services from the task of safeguarding children. Is the current Minister convinced that the research is clear that a mandatory reporting duty will help the task of protecting children, rather than hinder it? The clarity of the evidence will be very important when we come to debate the Home Secretary’s proposals, which we want to make sure go through.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The Government believe that a mandatory reporting mechanism will help the system, which is why we will introduce it.