Steve Race
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Grooming Gangs: Independent Inquiry
Steve Race Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Sarah Jones
I would be happy to have a conversation with the hon. Gentleman about any information he may have about police forces and what he has heard on that front. It would be very worrying if what he describes were the case. We have made it clear that ethnicity needs to be reported for the grooming-based CSE that we are dealing with here. In addition, in the police reform White Paper, which was announced in the King’s Speech and will be introduced soon, we committed ourselves to doing that across the board, so ethnicity reporting will be mandatory for the police.
Steve Race (Exeter) (Lab)
The Minister mentioned institutional blindness to these horrific crimes. Will she outline how this vital inquiry’s terms of reference have been designed to ensure a thorough examination of those institutional failings, which meant that action was not taken to protect children?
Sarah Jones
The terms of reference are very wide and very clear. They will look at culture, ethnicity, race and any kind of bias that was in the system. There is a wider question that Louise Casey has talked about many times, and which I am trying to drive through in policing, and others are trying to drive through in other areas of work, which is about professional curiosity: keeping an open mind; problem solving; looking and finding; being curious to get to the bottom of what is happening; and finding those connections. There is also a big piece of work around information sharing across different organisations, because there is a blindness that comes from all the different institutions not talking to each other in the way that they should and not picking up vulnerability where we should. We saw that with Southport and Nottingham, and we see it here. There is a big job to be done there, too.