Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

Robbie Moore Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right to raise this point. In fact, it was one of the issues raised as part of the independent inquiry’s two-year review of child exploitation. The review identified that teenage or young boys are being exploited and that there are often patterns of that starting with online exploitation. What started as online abuse and grooming then led to contact abuse and rape, and the most appalling violations. She is right to highlight this issue, and it is extremely important that this is taken into account and is part of the way in which local councils and police forces need to respond.

[Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)]

The House will be well aware that I have been consistently campaigning for a rape gangs inquiry into child sexual expectation across Keighley and the wider Bradford district for far too long. So I welcome some of the points that the Home Secretary has made, particularly on the implementation of the 20 recommendations from the IICSA report. Unfortunately, I do not feel that she is going far enough, and I would like to make a few points.

In particular, I have serious concerns about the ability of inquiries at a local level to compel witnesses to give evidence and about the amount of funding that will be made available. Will the local inquiries that the Home Secretary is advocating be truly independent, not just local authorities marking their own homework, and will they lead to convictions? Local authority leaders in Bradford district have consistently refused to back my calls for a public inquiry, as has the Mayor of West Yorkshire and the deputy Mayor for policing, Alison Lowe. How on earth are we meant to get across this barrier of local leaders refusing to have an inquiry on this issue without the Government stepping in and giving the statutory authority that we on this side of the House are demanding?

[Yvette Cooper]

It is obviously really important to ensure that there is independent scrutiny. The hon. Member will be aware that the inquiry in Rotherham led by Baroness Louise Casey used inspectorate powers, but it was clearly independent and it managed to uncover serious problems that had gone wrong in Rotherham at that time, so there are different ways of doing this. The Telford inquiry was funded locally, but it managed to involve victims and survivors, and it also managed to shape the inquiry in the way that victims and survivors wanted, which is also important. For all areas right across the country, the most important thing is still to get police investigations going after the perpetrators, getting them before the courts and getting them behind bars. Whatever else happens, getting stronger police investigations in order to pursue perpetrators must remain at the heart of what happens.