Vikki Slade
Main Page: Vikki Slade (Liberal Democrat - Mid Dorset and North Poole)Department Debates - View all Vikki Slade's debates with the Home Office
Grooming Gangs: Independent Inquiry
Vikki Slade Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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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.
Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)
The abuse of children is the most disgusting of crimes, and anyone who is involved in it, or who protects someone involved in it, must face justice. The hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe), who I note is not in his place, published his report this week, and my constituents are eager to understand why the statutory inquiry will take three years—[Interruption.] Another two years—several years. Why is the Government-backed inquiry going to take so long?
Sarah Jones
The hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) has done a piece of work. I welcome the work that he has done, and hope that he will pass on to the police and the inquiry any evidence, criminal or otherwise, that he has gathered. This is an independent statutory inquiry—it is a very different thing. It will be absolutely ruthless in making sure that we can outline every single part of what has gone wrong here and learn every single lesson that we have to learn, so it is a completely different thing.
Statutory inquiries have taken years and years in the past, and Louise Casey was very clear that she wanted it to be time limited, so we have said that we want it finished, which is unusual for an inquiry—some inquiries that the previous Government set up are still ongoing. It will be done by 2029, but it is a completely different piece of work. It will be enormously thorough, get to the bottom of what happened, and bring us the answers that I know victims and the whole country want to see.