Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to ensure police forces have sufficient resources to investigate grooming gang offences.

This Government is committed to strengthening local and national responses to child sexual exploitation and abuse, through the new national police operation in response to Baroness Casey’s Audit recommendations, which will identify inconsistencies in approach to investigating group based child sexual exploitation (including grooming gangs) and ensure identified best practice and lessons learnt are shared through guidance, including on the identification and protection of children at risk.

Additionally we continue to support existing investments to support policing to tackle this type of offending.

Central to these efforts is the Home Office-funded Child Sexual Exploitation Police Taskforce which provides practical, expert, on the ground support for all 43 forces in England and Wales. This includes identifying best practice and promoting it nationally to ensure any lessons learnt are shared widely, and providing specialist interventions where needed to support forces’ capabilities to identify and tackle group-based offending more effectively. The Home Office engages regularly with the Taskforce and policing leaders on this work which has victims and survivors at its heart.

The Home Office is also investing over £9 million this year in the Tackling Organised Exploitation Programme (TOEX), including an expedited rollout of its Capabilities Environment to ensure all police investigators in England and Wales have access to an array of AI-enabled and time-saving tools. This will increase law enforcement’s capability to respond to organised exploitation, including child sexual exploitation by providing dedicated intelligence, analytical and technical expertise.

The Department has regular discussions with policing on the identification and protection of children at risk, particularly in relation to the risk of sexual exploitation due to policing’s duties as a statutory safeguarding partner. This is particularly the case as reforms are implemented through the introduction of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

We are also working with the College of Policing and the National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection to consider how forces’ most important resource can be bolstered – its officers. We continue to identify opportunities to strengthen officer training at all ranks to ensure the most effective and up-to-date methods to tackle child sexual exploitation and abuse are utilised.