Ministers have ordered an urgent national review of the scale of grooming gangs and will also help councils run their own local inquiries into the issue, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has announced.
While ministers have faced sustained pressure to order a new national inquiry into the gangs, officials stress that the review announced to MPs by Cooper is not this, simply a rapid assessment of what is known about the extent of such offences.
The review, to be led by Louise Casey – who was tasked just a fortnight ago with leading a wider inquiry into social care – is intended to be completed in three months, and provide a national picture of what is known.
The Home Office and Downing Street have not definitively ruled out another national inquiry, and it is possible that Casey’s review could lead to this. However, the preference remains for more rapid, local exercises, coupled with more help for victims and survivors.
Cooper unveiled a series of other new initiatives including an extra £10m in funding to tackle the gangs and support victims, and support for councils to run local inquiries, advised by Tom Crowther KC, who led such an investigation in Telford.
Another change will be widening the remit of the Child Sexual Abuse Review Panel, run jointly by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the Crown Prosecution Service, so victims can seek a review of their cases even if they took place after 2013.
Other new measures include Cooper working with the NPCC to push chief constables in England and Wales to look at past cases, and to improve the recording of data on the ethnicity of offenders.
Cooper and Downing Street have resisted calls for a national inquiry, saying their belief – one they say is shared by a majority of victims and experts – is to instead prioritise implementing the recommendations from the existing national inquiry, led by Prof Alexis Jay, which reported in 2022.
Cooper announced that ministers would lay out a timetable for implementing Jay’s recommendations by Easter.
The issue of the gangs has been catapulted back into public consciousness after Elon Musk, the billionaire and Donald Trump aide, called for a new inquiry, in often misleading posts on X, the social media platform he owns.
Article by:Source – Peter Walker Senior political correspondent
