Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of a comparative review of grooming-gang offences with other countries to learn best practice.

The Government continues to invest in a range of work to strengthen law enforcement capacity and capability to tackle child sexual abuse and exploitation, including group-based offending. We support the Child Sexual Exploitation Police Taskforce, which has a continuous professional development offer for police forces, aiming to upskill forces and improve the investigative response to child sexual exploitation, including group-based offending. We also invest in the Prevention Programme, delivered by The Children’s Society, which works to raise awareness of child exploitation, including child sexual exploitation, through upskilling safeguarding staff at all levels and improving local system responses to child exploitation. This includes working closely with local policing partners.

The Government also remains committed to continuing close collaboration with international partners to establish common global standards, share best practice and insights, and build international capacity to combat these horrific crimes.

To preserve the independence of the judiciary, the Lord Chief Justice (LCJ), the Senior President of Tribunals, and the Chief Coroner have statutory responsibility for judicial training, under the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007, and Coroners and Justice Act 2009 respectively. These responsibilities are exercised through the Judicial College.

Further to my previous response, the Child Sexual Exploitation Police Taskforce has brought together the best police data that is currently available on group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse, in its publication of November 2024.

I refer the Rt Hon Member to The Home Secretary’s statement on 16 January, which set out the actions the Government is taking forward to improve our response to and understand of child sexual exploitation and abuse that is committed by Pakistani heritage grooming gangs. This includes improving the data available on the perpetration of these crimes, as part of which the Home Secretary has asked the Child Sexual Exploitation Police Taskforce to expand the ethnicity data it collects and publishes – in particular by gathering data from the end of the investigation when a fuller picture is available.

The Home Secretary is also appointing Baroness Louise Casey to lead a rapid three-month audit to improve our understanding of the scale, nature and drivers of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse at a national and local level, including what is known about the demographics of perpetrators and victims, and to make recommendations on what additional action is needed to improve our response.