Child Sexual Exploitation: Casey Report

Shaun Davies Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I welcome that question, and I am glad that Baroness Casey will have the opportunity to set out more details of her findings. As the right hon. Lady will know, Baroness Casey has huge expertise and determination, and will be forthright in giving the evidence that she has drawn together.

It will be important for the commission conducting the independent inquiry to have arrangements with police forces to ensure that criminal investigations that are currently under way are not cut across. It is also important to ensure that we can uncover institutional failings, because institutional failures to pursue action, or the turning of a blind eye, need to be looked into in particular areas, as part of the local investigations and the national inquiry. As the right hon. Lady will know, arrangements of this kind have featured in past inquiries, so they can be made and will need to be made again now.

[Shaun Davies (Telford) (Lab)]

Let me first praise and pay tribute to survivors across the country, and draw attention again to the survivors who worked in Telford along with me and various organisations to carry out the local review. We did so because the then Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, and the then local government Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), refused to provide a statutory inquiry into what had happened in Telford. That is why we worked with the police and crime commissioner—who happens to be a Conservative—and with people across the political spectrum to take this matter out of the party political field and try to find answers in our small part of the world.

What we need, though, is action. We need action in respect of the Jay inquiry and in respect of the Casey review, but does the Home Secretary agree that we also need action in respect of the number of local reviews that have taken place up and down the country whose findings have not been on the desks of Ministers over the last 14 years and which have therefore not received the attention that they deserve?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right: what we need is change and action, and recommendations from inquiries need to be implemented. Part of the strength of the Telford inquiry lay in the fact that victims and survivors were at its very heart, and there were also serious plans to ensure, and ways of ensuring, that the recommendations were implemented. That is crucial. It is no good having inquiries if recommendations just sit on the shelf; we must ensure that they are implemented, as well as pursuing answers.