Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate her Department has made of the number of (a) victims and (b) perpetrators of live cases of gang-based child sexual exploitation.

The Child Sexual Exploitation Police Taskforce has brought together the best police data that is currently available on group-based offending. This was published in November 2024: https://www.hydrantprogramme.co.uk/publications/hydrant-publications#LatestNews).

The taskforce reports that 127 major police investigations across 29 police forces are currently under way into child sexual exploitation and gang grooming. However, as the Home Secretary set out in her statement on 16 January, the Home Office will overhaul the data that we expect local areas to collect on child sexual exploitation and abuse as part of a new performance framework for policing, and we have already asked the Taskforce to immediately expand the data it collects and publishes, including on ethnicity.

To go further, the Home Secretary has asked Baroness Louise Casey to oversee a rapid audit of the current scale and nature of gang-based child sexual exploitation across the country. That work is currently underway.