Grooming Gangs

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con) [V]]

It is difficult to encapsulate in four minutes something that I have spent many years, as a former children’s Minister, campaigning against. Back in November 2011, we launched the Government’s child sexual exploitation action plan in collaboration with The Times, which had long campaigned on this subject, Barnardo’s and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which published its report, “Out of Mind, Out of Sight”.

We worked with police, children’s social care, children’s charities and, importantly, with children and young people—the victims—and parents themselves. That followed the high-profile series of prosecutions and convictions after Derbyshire police’s Operation Retriever, which brought this subject to the newspaper headlines for the first time. It was almost a year before the dramatic Savile revelations, which opened the floodgates for people to be aware of the presence, extent and historical reach of CSE.

The action plan highlighted the fact that CSE can happen anywhere to anyone. It is not exclusive to northern metropolitan boroughs, or to people from estates on the other side of town, or to troubled girls, as some hon. Members have mentioned. I met survivors of CSE from the families of doctors and lawyers and from middle-class backgrounds and heard their deeply harrowing accounts. I mentioned the CEOP’s report “Out of Mind, Out of Sight”, because this and all these reports had uncovered a systemic and systematic culture of neglect, secrecy and, in too many cases, wilful complacency to call out the issue of teenage white girls, in some cases boys, being sexually abused by British Pakistani grooming gangs. It was a taboo subject. It was swept under the carpet. Disgracefully, the victims were often regarded as having asked for it. The insidious tentacles of political correctness often suffocated action, so we set out an action plan. Above all, we called for urgent action based on complete transparency, encouraging survivors to come forward and speak out and to put the whole shameful problem firmly on the nation’s radar.

The following September, the Savile revelations broke. Every day, the media was full of accounts of CSE across celebrities, religious institutions, schools and so on. Virtually nowhere was immune. There was a fear that the original phenomenon of organised CSE of primarily teenage white girls at the hands of these predominantly British Pakistani grooming gangs would be sidelined by the prominence being given to others, despite a catalogue of such cases from Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford and well beyond.

It is a real disappointment that, today, we are having to debate an issue based on the lack of transparency about the extent of the systemic activities of these grooming gangs, which are still going on. I appreciate that most of those convicted for CSE are middle-aged white men, many acting alone, but the phenomenon of organised British Pakistani grooming gangs is a specific and dangerous criminal activity, and it needs to be called out for what it is and tackled in a very specific way. So why on earth are we having to debate now why maximum transparency has not been applied to research into how these gangs operate and how they are still getting away with it, because this is not an historic matter but still a contemporary problem?

The problem of secrecy and the culture of denial within certain police forces was again brought to the fore last year, with the new inquiry announced by the Mayor of Greater Manchester into the abandonment of Operation Augusta. If we are really to get to grips with the issue of grooming gangs, surely we need to delineate it as a specific sexual offence distinct from other forms of sexual offence. For that, we need to be open and transparent with all the research already undertaken and to undertake more if it is needed. We have had the Jay report, the Louise Casey report, and the former Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), commissioned his own report, which seems to have been downgraded and has now morphed into an external reference group consisting of several hon. Members. When the former Home Secretary launched the original inquiry, he intended it as a comprehensive and definitive report on child grooming, published in full, so why has this research and report become a no-go area? We owe it to the victims and the survivors to publish in full.