Grooming Gangs

John Hayes Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Facts are often inconvenient. They are sometimes disturbing and occasionally alarming. The facts are that in Oxford, 373 children, including 50 boys, may have been targeted over a 16-year period, according to a serious case review. In Rotherham, as we have heard, 1,500 children—most of them white girls between the age of 11 and 15—were sexually abused, predominantly by British Pakistani men. In Rochdale, nine men who abused girls as young as 13 were convicted over a child sex grooming ring, and we know again that the Pakistani community was disproportionately represented among those convicted.

Those are the facts, but the fiction—well illustrated by the Home Office report published last December, which is a study in obfuscation, by the way—is that we cannot draw conclusions about whether certain ethnicities are over-represented in this type of offending. We must not allow concerns about causing offence to leave children vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Of course it is true that all kinds of people do all kinds of wicked things—people from all parts of this country and of all ethnicities—but there is a proven relationship with certain subcultures and a subset of a particular community being engaged in this activity. The former Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) recognised that, as does the current Home Secretary. The reports and studies into these events recognise all that, so let us deal with facts rather than fiction.

Mindful of that, I must also note that the Jay report and other inquiries show a proven link to taxis. Taxis were used to cruise and pick up young girls from care homes and even schools. As the Minister of State for Transport, I commissioned a report into taxi licensing with a view to putting safety at the top of the agenda. That report, which was conducted by Professor Mohammed Abdel-Haq on my behalf, looked at how taxis could be made safer, partly on the back of the events in Rochdale and Rotherham and elsewhere. It is imperative that the Government now look again at that report and put into law those recommendations, which will guarantee that these things do not happen again. My dear friend—though he is not an hon. Friend in the technical sense—the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) brought forward a private Member’s Bill which would have gone some way to putting those recommendations in place, and I ask the Government to please look at that Bill again.

The Home Office needs to rethink this matter, and I think the Home Secretary knows it. We owe it not only as a matter of respect to previous victims, but as a matter of care to those who might be victims in the future. We owe it to the vast majority of our British Asian community who share our horror at what has occurred. Most of all, we owe it to ourselves as legislators, for if we care enough, and I believe that Ministers and Members of this House do, we must do enough to protect the vulnerable.