Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the number of (a) girls groomed for sexual exploitation and (b) perpetrators of child sexual exploitation in the latest period for which figures are available.

The Government does not currently hold such figures. We are working to build the national picture of the nature and scale of this sort of abuse.

We have introduced new requirements for the police to record information relating to these offences which, along with the establishment of a new national Centre of Expertise on child sexual abuse, will help us to build a more informed picture of the scale of these crimes and the best ways to tackle and prevent them in the future.