Tackling Child Sexual Abuse

Nick Timothy Excerpts

Tuesday 8th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips]

We have had discussions with our Scottish counterparts on some of the legislation that we are currently passing, including the legislation on child sexual abuse online, artificial intelligence, and some of the dangers that Alexis Jay rightly pointed out in the final recommendations of her report. We have those conversations; obviously, issues of child protection are devolved to Scotland, but we cannot do this work in isolation, especially because children are trafficked across the border. I am always very happy to work with counterparts in the Scottish Government to drive progress—and, frankly, to learn from them sometimes.

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

I share the anger and frustration expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) about the lack of progress on inquiring into the rape gangs, and I was incredibly disappointed by the Minister’s failure to answer a single question put to her by the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam), including the refusal to acknowledge that these crimes were racially and religiously aggravated. I will repeat just one of those questions: in many of the rape gang cases, councillors, council workers and police officers were complicit and often corrupt, so why are the Government refusing to set up a specialist unit in the National Crime Agency to investigate those who should have protected those innocent girls, but instead participated in and facilitated their abuse?

[Jess Phillips]

To answer the hon. Gentleman’s question, if criminal cases can be brought against any of those people, I am more than happy to speak to the taskforce that is working to improve the number of arrests—as I said, we have seen an increase in arrests—and see where criminal cases can be brought against them. I am more than happy to see those people locked up for as long as they deserve. However, we were left for some decades without a mandatory reporting duty on the statute books, one that would enable us to take to task, through the criminal justice system, the people who covered this up. We will rectify that.