Child Sexual Exploitation: Casey Report

Patricia Ferguson Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I say to the hon. Member that child sexual exploitation and abuse are some of the most vile crimes that our country faces. What Baroness Casey’s report sets out in some detail, over 17 pages, is that there has been report after report after review after review but so many of the recommendations were never implemented, so concerns that were raised at the time of the Rotherham inquiry about issues around ethnicity, lack of information-sharing and lack of protection for children were simply not acted on. Baroness Casey herself says:

“If we’d got this right years ago—seeing these girls as children raped rather than ‘wayward teenagers’…then I doubt we’d be in this place now.”

The hon. Member was a member of the previous Government, who failed to do that. I hope that he agrees that successive Governments and agencies across the country have failed to act. We need to ensure that there is a proper independent inquiry, as well as, most crucially of all, action by police in the operations that will bring perpetrators to justice and put them behind bars.

[Patricia Ferguson (Glasgow West) (Lab)]

I thank my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary for her statement. One of the questions running through Baroness Casey’s audit is “Why?”—not just why that type of offending has been allowed to grow unchecked in our society, but why people are driven to commit such vile crimes. Can the Home Secretary assure me that the Government will commission serious, thorough and considered research into the drivers of group-based child sexual exploitation, including looking at all the issues around ethnicity and age? Will those findings be shared with the devolved Administrations who, as we have heard, have not been exempt from these issues?

[Yvette Cooper]

Yes, I can say to my hon. Friend that we accept that recommendation in Baroness Casey’s report and we will commission research into the drivers of child sexual exploitation and, more widely, violence against women and girls, so that we have stronger evidence to keep children safe.