Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

Tessa Munt Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I agree. These terrible crimes have been ignored for too long. There are currently 127 major police operations under way on child sexual exploitation and gang grooming, across 29 different police forces. The independent inquiry identified that child sexual exploitation happens across all police force areas and all communities. All areas should ensure that they have the proper systems in place to follow up on what is happening to missing children, such as the vulnerable kids who stay out overnight, or those who go missing from residential care homes. Too often, that is still not happening and too often, we still get reports, even though those are basic things that all police forces and local authorities should be doing.

That is why we have strengthened the powers for victims to get a review, and that is why we are requiring police forces to look back at historical cases, because we know that cases are not being reported and not being investigated. That is where the fastest action needs to be, to go after the perpetrators who are still on our streets and still getting away with it. They will continue to do so unless police forces and local councils work together to put perpetrators behind bars.

[Tessa Munt (Wells and Mendip Hills) (LD)]

I refer the House to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and particularly to the fact that I am a director of WhistleblowersUK, a not-for-profit organisation. I am the last remaining MP of the seven Members of the House of Commons who originally called on Theresa May to hold an independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. My experiences are also on the record. I therefore particularly welcome the acceptance of Professor Alexis Jay’s recommendations and Baroness Louise Casey’s rapid review into child sexual exploitation.

May I, however, draw the Home Secretary’s attention to my concern about police investigations? She has referred to the matter of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and to reopening cases, but I am concerned about people marking their own homework and we know that there is an institutional resistance to being found lacking and to deep scrutiny.

One of the primary whistleblowers with whom I was involved has waited years for the truth to out, and senior police officers have threatened to sue her. It would appear that complaints can only be made about junior officers who are called and investigated, and that there is no ability to complain about senior officers. I ask the Home Secretary to look at the Independent Police Complaints Commission and the Independent Office for Police Conduct reports, whether they have been published or not—particularly where they have not been published—and where there have been threats, as I understand it, from the police to sue members of those organisations about their findings. It is incredibly serious that we have organisations such as the IPCC and the IOPC—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

Order. I call the Home Secretary.