Operation Augusta

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Operation Augusta.

This is a story of the gross failure of public policy, and the implementation of public policy, to protect vulnerable children. Andy Burnham, the Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester watched “The Betrayed Girls”, a BBC programme about the sexual abuse and exploitation of young people, in 2017. Afterwards, he set up what became the independent assurance review of the effectiveness of multi-agency responses to child sexual exploitation in Greater Manchester. I want to discuss part 1, which is an assurance review of Operation Augusta.

I watched “The Betrayed Girls” on Sunday evening on BBC iPlayer, and it was a harrowing experience. Reading the report, one varies between despair and outrage at the failures of Greater Manchester police and Manchester City Council to protect mainly young girls, but young boys too, from predatory sexual exploitation.

If we had the same rules as the US Senate, I would ask for the report to be read into the record so that people could read it, but we do not, so I will have to summarise it. Part 1 focuses on Operation Augusta, which was set up following the death of Victoria Agoglia on 29 September 2003. She died after being injected with heroin by a 50-year-old man. Shockingly, although she died in 2003, the report states that there has been no follow-up investigation into her death, despite the fact that Peter Fahy, the chief constable, told her relatives afterwards that he was quite happy to look at the case again, which led them to believe that it would be. Since then, Peter Fahy has said that he was just being open. I think that is dissimulating to the point of dishonesty. It was clearly the intention to reassure the family that the death of this girl would not be forgotten.

There has been no investigation, although there has been a coroner’s inquest. Four of my colleagues from Manchester and I have written to the Attorney General asking for a fresh inquest. Reading the report, it is difficult to see why the coroner came to the conclusion he did. It is particularly difficult because the current coroner is refusing to release documents. In the absence of those documents, we would like the Attorney General to order a fresh inquest.

The coroner’s conclusion was that

“there was no evidence of a gross failure to meet Victoria’s needs that would have had a significant bearing on her death”

and that there could be no inference that the events leading to her death were “reasonably foreseeable”. She claimed she had been raped, sexually abused, assaulted and plied with drugs for two years, and the coroner could not see how her death was reasonably foreseeable. The social workers knew what was happening; they had given her recommendations about what to do. I think her death was eminently foreseeable, so I hope that the Attorney General will agree to order the opening of an inquest and that the Home Office will support that.

That was the genesis of Operation Augusta, which was set up to see whether many children—mainly girls aged between 13 and 16—were in the same situation as Victoria Agoglia. A dedicated team of police officers was set up with embedded social workers to look at the situation. Relatively quickly, they found that there were 57 girls in a similar situation and 97 suspected perpetrators of this kind of vile abuse.

The report makes it clear that although Operation Augusta was successful in identifying those girls and suspected perpetrators, it was bedevilled by a lack of resources and territorial disputes between three police divisions in Manchester and about access to HOLMES, the police computer that records cases. The situation was difficult, and it is clear that leadership was lacking. After 16 months, Operation Augusta was wound up.

One of the many worrying factors about this report is that the social workers and more junior police officers have vivid and clear recollections of the operation.

[James Daly (Bury North) (Con)]

The report is scandalous, harrowing and difficult to read. I quote one thing with reference to what the hon. Gentleman has just said:

“the decision to close down Operation Augusta was driven by the decision by senior officers to remove the resources from the investigation rather than a sound understanding that all lines of enquiry had been successfully completed or exhausted”.

On its own merits, that is scandalous. That is in the report. I also read—

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Christopher Chope (in the Chair)]

Could you resume your seat, please?

[Graham Stringer]

The hon. Gentleman is underlining and emphasising my point about the lack of resources and leadership.

Two of the senior officers became chief constables afterwards, and their recollection of events is either non-existent or hazy. I simply do not believe that someone who had been in charge of such an operation and received such awful reports would not remember—the junior officers have clear memories of how it was finished. That, of course, meant that the perpetrators, who were known about by the police and social workers, carried on, as the report says, in plain sight. A lot of the abuse took place above Indian restaurants on Wilmslow Road—the so-called curry mile—in south Manchester. Cars were known to pull up with girls, and the police did nothing—in fact, they withdrew from acting on that information. As the hon. Member for Bury North (James Daly) said, that is scandalous.

Since the termination of Operation Augusta, the response of Greater Manchester police and Manchester City Council to this quite shocking report has been to apologise and to say that they are improving co-ordination and intensifying work to identify people, and they have done that. The awful thing is that, for the last 50 years, many of the children who have been abused and murdered have become the subjects of well-known operations. Reports always make 80 or 90 recommendations after such failures, and those are always agreed to, but we carry on writing reports, and children carry on being abused. Although I believe that Manchester City Council and Greater Manchester police are sincere in their attempts to be more effective and to get their act together, we need to understand the issue more deeply by asking why these things have happened time and again and what can be done to prevent a report from being written in 16 years’ time about children who are on the streets now, while we discuss this situation.

I referred to the clear memories of the more junior police officers and the amnesia of the senior officers involved. If there had been a different culture and stronger protections for whistleblowers, allowing those junior police officers and social workers to report such cases in the knowledge that they would not lose their careers, I believe more would have been done. In no sense would the public have put up with what happened if they had known about it—they expect our children’s services departments and the police to protect the most vulnerable young women—but they know about it only 16 years later. We need stronger protections for whistleblowers and an acceptance that bringing such issues to the attention of the public and senior politicians is a good thing.

Although there were disputes about resource allocation in the police force and between Greater Manchester police and Manchester City Council, one has to remember that, at the time, police numbers were going up and local government was better funded. That is no longer the case; there is not a children’s department in the country that is not short of resources for the protection of children. We cannot wish, as I do, for better service provision for those vulnerable people without providing the resources. Police numbers have also gone down. However, that decline in resources does not apply to the time of Operation Augusta.

Another point that was made in “The Betrayed Girls” and in the report, and that has been made more generally, is that the vast majority of the men involved were of Pakistani origin and of the Muslim faith. The police, who probably had good intentions, made a mistake in saying, “We will be accused of racism if we point this out.” Nazir Afzal, the previous director of public prosecutions in the north-west and a practising Muslim, said that such activities are against the teaching of Islam and of the Koran, and that the vast majority of Pakistani people are as appalled by what has happened as the rest of the population. That is not to say that one should hide what has happened on Wilmslow Road or in other parts of the country, such as Telford, Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford or Ipswich—one can go on and on listing different towns where such cases have happened.

A final point on resources is that a number of requests have been made for the Home Office to do serious research into grooming. My hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) recently asked that of the Home Office, both by letter and on the Floor of the House. It is a mistake to think that the grooming of children, as described in the report, is the same as paedophile rings. The Home Office has done good research on paedophile rings. They are understood by the police and the Home Office, which know how to disrupt them. However, very little research has been done on grooming gangs. For instance, we do not know whether there are “Mr Bigs” behind the gangs at a national level or whether the cases represent major crime or decentralised local activity. That is important for our understanding; if it is major crime, organised on a national and international basis like drug crime, the National Crime Agency should be involved in disrupting that activity. I would be grateful if the Minister explained when the Home Office will fund and sponsor research into grooming gangs.

As I said, if people had blown the whistle, a stop could probably have been put to these things, because the public would not stand for them. I want to mention two people who have stayed with this issue and have continued to bring it to the public’s attention since the first Rochdale and Rotherham cases came to light. Sara Rowbotham, who worked in Rochdale as head of its crisis intervention team and is now a Rochdale councillor, and Margaret Oliver, who was a detective on the Augusta team before her maternity leave, have constantly brought it to the public’s attention. Margaret has argued very strongly, alongside the family of Victoria Agoglia, for the case to be re-opened and for the police to take more action against the perpetrators. Those two women deserve serious praise for what they are doing. I do not want in any sense to trivialise this serious debate, but they are more worthy of being nominated to the House of Lords than some of the people who have been put forward by the Labour party, which has put forward a pretty eccentric list, to put it mildly.

[James Daly]

I agree completely with the hon. Gentleman on that. Why has nobody from the GMP or Manchester City Council been held accountable for the failings identified in the report?

[Graham Stringer]

I am not sure that I have a good answer for the hon. Gentleman. Some people, such as Pauline Newman, who was in charge of children’s services at the time, have moved on. The senior police officers who took the decision to wind up operation Augusta have moved on and are not co-operating—one is not talking at all, and the other says he cannot remember. In such circumstances, when people are no longer employed by the city council or Greater Manchester police, it is difficult to know what action could be taken or by whom. However, the hon. Gentleman asks a good question. A line of accountability is needed. When one reads the report and some of the reports since, records of meetings or of attendees at those meetings are absent in some cases. That makes things difficult. However, if his point is that somebody should be held accountable, I agree with him. That is clearly right.

The final point I want to make in this sad story is that the police and Manchester City Council have said that they will improve. Today, however, Greater Manchester police have declared a “critical incident” in the introduction of their iOPS computer system, which 90% of police officers rely on to get information. The system cost £29 million and is not working. With the best will in the world, if the officers whose job it is to look into these allegations do not know what is happening, they cannot do their job. We need not only resources—more police officers—but the proper use of resources and computer systems. Currently, when I have no doubt that many perpetrators are still walking the streets of Greater Manchester and other cities, we need Greater Manchester police to do better.

This is an awful and shocking story of the failure to protect some of the most vulnerable people in the country. One of the failures, which was a mistake, is that action was not taken in some cases because the police said that the girls were not reliable witnesses. However, there have been policy statements to the effect that we do not have to rely on the victims to protect themselves in order to take the perpetrators to court. I hope that the Home Office and all the councils in the country will redouble their efforts to ensure that such activities, which I am sure still happen, are stopped.