Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government whether the Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs will consider the role that religion or culture played in enabling or facilitating abuse by grooming gangs, and not only the role that those factors played in responses to the abuse, as outlined in paragraph 4.3 of the draft terms of reference.

On 9 December 2025, the Home Secretary published the draft Terms of Reference for the Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs and asked the Chair to consult on them.

Following the consultation, the Chair will make recommendations to the Home Secretary. Final Terms of Reference will be agreed and published by 31 March 2026. The Home Secretary has been clear (in her Oral Statement of 9 December) that the inquiry will consider, explicitly, the background of offenders – including their ethnicity, religion and culture – and whether the authorities failed to properly investigate what happened out of a misplaced desire to protect community cohesion. The inquiry will act without fear or favour, identifying individual, institutional and systemic failure, inadequate organisational responses, and failures of leadership.

The Home Secretary has also commissioned new research from UK Research and Innovation to address longstanding gaps in our understanding of perpetrators’ backgrounds and motivations, including factors such as ethnicity and religion.