Asked by: Lee Pitcher (Labour - Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking with Cabinet colleagues to help tackle (a) grooming gangs and (b) child sexual exploitation.
Answered by Jess Phillips - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Home Office)
On 6 and 16 January, the Home Secretary announced to Parliament a raft of measures to go further in tackling child sexual abuse and exploitation, including 'grooming gangs' offending.
The Home Secretary has written to the National Police Chiefs' Council requesting officers look again at these unsolved and closed grooming gangs cases, backed by £2.5m in funding for stronger investigations The remit of the Independent Child Sexual Abuse Review Panel has also been extended so that it covers not just historic cases before 2013 but all cases since to ensure victims of abuse have the right to an independent review
This includes appointing Baroness Louise Casey to oversee an audit to improve our understanding of the scale, nature and drivers of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse at a national and local level, and to make recommendations on what additional action is needed to improve our response.
We will provide stronger support for local areas which are interested in undertaking work to better understand and tackle local grooming gang issues and improve their own local responses going forward.
We will also be working across Government to set out a clear timeline for taking forward the 20 recommendations from the final report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse by Easter.