Mr Speaker, with your permission, I will update the House on the audit the government commissioned from Baroness Casey on child sexual exploitation and grooming gangs, and on the action we are taking to tackle this vile crime – to put perpetrators behind bars, and to provide the innocent victims of those crimes with support and justice.
The House will be aware that on Friday, 7 men were found guilty of the most horrendous crimes in Rochdale between 2000 and 2006.
They were convicted of treating teenage girls as sex slaves – repeatedly raping them in filthy flats, alleyways and warehouses. The perpetrators included taxi drivers and market traders of Pakistani heritage, and it has taken 20 years to bring them to justice.
I want to pay tribute to the incredible bravery of the women who told their stories and have fought for justice through all those years. They should never have been let down for so long.
The sexual exploitation of children by grooming gangs is one of the most horrific crimes.
Children as young as 10 plied with drugs and alcohol, brutally raped by gangs of men and disgracefully let down again and again by the authorities who were meant to protect them and keep them safe.
These despicable crimes have caused the most unimaginable harm to victims and survivors throughout their lives and are a stain on our society.
Five months ago, I told the House our most important task was to stop perpetrators and put them behind bars.
I can report that that work is accelerating.
Arrests and investigations are increasing.
After I asked police forces in January to identify cases involving grooming and child sexual exploitation allegations that had been closed with no further action, more than 800 cases have now been identified for formal review.
And I expect that figure to rise above 1,000 in the coming weeks.
Let me be clear. Perpetrators of these vile crimes should be off our streets, behind bars and paying the price for what they have done.
Further rapid action is also under way to finally implement recommendations of past inquiries and reviews – including the 7-year Independent Inquiry into Child Abuse – recommendations which for too long have sat on the shelf.
So in the Crime and Policing Bill, we are introducing:
The long overdue mandatory reporting duty which I called for more than 10 years ago.
As well as aggravated offences for grooming offenders so their sentences match the severity of their crimes.
And earlier this year, I also commissioned Baroness Louise Casey to undertake a rapid national audit of the nature, scale and characteristics of gang-based exploitation.
I specifically asked her to look at the issue of ethnicity, and the cultural and social drivers for this type of offending – analysis that had never previously been done despite years of concerns being raised.
And I asked her to advise us on what further reviews, investigations and actions would be needed to address the current and historical failures that she found.
I told Parliament in January that I expected Baroness Casey to deliver the same kind of impactful and no-holds-barred report that she produced on Rotherham in 2015 so we never shy away from the reality of these terrible crimes.
And I am very grateful to Louise and her team that they have done exactly that, with a hugely wide-ranging assessment conducted in just 4 months.
The findings of her audit are damning.
At its heart she identifies a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children. A continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation, and serious violence. And from the scars that last a lifetime.
She finds too much fragmentation in the authorities’ response, too little sharing of information, too much reliance on flawed data, too much denial, too little justice, too many criminals getting off, too many victims being let down.
The audit describes;
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victims as young as 10 – often those in care, or children with learning or physical disabilities – being singled out for grooming precisely because of their vulnerability
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perpetrators still walking free because no one joined the dots or because the law ended up protecting them instead of the victims that they had exploited
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deep rooted institutional failures, stretching back decades, where organisations who should have protected children and punished offenders looked the other way – and Baroness Casey found “blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions” all played a part in this collective failure
But on the key issues of ethnicity that I had asked her to examine, she has found continued failure to gather proper robust national data, despite concerns being raised going back very many years. In the local data that the audit examined from 3 police forces they identify clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men. And she refers to “examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions”.
Mr Speaker, these findings are deeply disturbing.
But most disturbing of all, as Baroness Casey makes clear, is the fact that too many of these findings are not new.
As her audit sets out, there have been 15 years of reports, reviews, inquiries and investigations into these appalling rapes, exploitation and violent crimes against children – detailed over 17 pages in her report – but too little has changed.
We have lost more than a decade. That must end now.
Baroness Casey sets out 12 recommendations for change. We will take action on all of them immediately.
Because we cannot afford more wasted years so we will introduce:
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new laws to protect children and support victims so they stop being blamed for the appalling crimes committed against them
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new major police operations to pursue perpetrators and put them behind bars
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a new national inquiry to direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures
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new ethnicity data and research so we face up to the facts on exploitation and abuse
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new action across children’s services and other agencies to identify children at risk
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and further action to support child victims and tackle new forms of exploitation and abuse online
Taken together, this will mark the biggest programme of work ever pursued to root out the scourge of grooming gangs and child sexual exploitation.
Those vile perpetrators who have grown used to the authorities looking the other way must have no place to hide.
So let me spell out the next steps we are announcing today.
Baroness Casey’s first recommendation is that we must see children as children.
She concludes that too many grooming cases have been dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges because a 13 to 15-year-old is perceived to have been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.
So we will change the law to ensure that adults who engage in penetrative sex with a child under 16 face the most serious charge of rape, and we will work closely with the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] and the police to ensure there are safeguards for consensual teenage relationships.
And we will change the law so that those convicted for child prostitution offences while their rapists got off scot-free will have their convictions disregarded and their criminal records expunged.
Baroness Casey’s next recommendation is a national criminal operation.
As I have set out, arrests and investigations are rising.
But the audit recommends us going further
So I can announce that the police will launch a new national criminal operation into grooming gangs, overseen by the National Crime Agency bringing together for the first time all arms of the policing response and will develop a rigorous new national operating model which all forces across the country will be able to adopt.
Ensuring grooming gangs are always treated as serious and organised crime.
So rapists who groom children whether their crimes were committed decades ago or are still being committed today can end up behind bars.
But alongside justice there must also be accountability and action.
We have begun implementing the recommendations from inquiries past, including Professor Jay’s Independent Inquiry.
And we have said that further inquiries are needed to get accountability in local areas.
I told the House in January I would undertake further work to look at how to ensure those inquiries could get the evidence they needed to properly hold institutions to account and we have sought responses from local councils too.
We asked Baroness Casey to review those responses, as well as the arrangements and powers that had been used in past investigations and inquiries, to consider the best means to get to the truth.
Her report concludes that further local investigations are needed but that they should be directed and overseen by a national commission with statutory inquiry powers.
We agree. And we will set up a national inquiry to that effect.
Baroness Casey is not recommending another over-arching inquiry of the kind conducted by Professor Alexis Jay and she recommends that the inquiry should be time limited.
But its purpose must be to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies, and we will set out the further details on the national inquiry in due course.
Mr Speaker, I warned in January that the data collection we had inherited from the previous government on ethnicity was completely inadequate. That data was only collected on 37% of suspects.
Baroness Casey’s audit confirms that ethnicity data is not recorded for two-thirds of grooming gang perpetrators – and she says it is “not good enough to support any statements about the ethnicity of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders at the national level”. I agree with that conclusion.
Frankly it is ridiculous and helps no one that this basic information is not collected – especially when there have been warnings and recommendations stretching back 13 years about the woefully inadequate data on perpetrators which prevents patterns of crime being understood and tackled.
The immediate changes I announced in January to police recording practices are starting to improve the data, but we will need to go much further.
Baroness Casey’s audit examined local level data in 3 police force areas. Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire where high profile cases involving Pakistani-heritage men have long been investigated and reported – and there they found the suspects of group-based child sexual offences were disproportionately likely to be Asian men.
She also found indications of disproportionality in serious case reviews.
While much more robust national data is needed, we cannot and must not shy away from these findings. Because as Baroness Casey says: “ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities.”
The vast majority of people in our British Asian and Pakistani heritage communities continue to be appalled by these terrible crimes and they agree that the criminal minority of sick predators and perpetrators in every community must be dealt with robustly by the criminal law.
Baroness Casey’s review also identifies prosecutions and investigations into perpetrators who are White British, European, African or Middle Eastern, just as Alexis Jay’s Inquiry concluded that all ethnicities and communities were involved in appalling child abuse crimes.
So to provide accurate information to help tackle serious crimes we will make it a formal requirement for the first time to collect both ethnicity and nationality data for all cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation.
And we will commission new research into the cultural and social drivers of child sexual exploitation, misogyny and violence against women and girls, as Baroness Casey has recommended.
The final group of recommendations from the audit is about the continued failure of agencies that should be keeping children safe to share vital information or act on clear signs of risk.
Worryingly the audit finds that whilst reports of child sexual abuse and exploitation to the police have gone up, the number of child sexual abuse cases identified for protection plans by local children’s services has fallen to its lowest ever level. But no one has been curious as to why
And the audit details an abysmal failure to respond to 15 years’ worth of recommendations and warnings about the failings of inter-agency co-operation.
So we will act at pace to deliver on Baroness Casey’s recommendations on mandatory sharing of information between agencies and on unique reference numbers for children, the work already being taken forward by my Right Honourable Friend the Education Secretary.
And my Right Honourable Friend the Transport Secretary will also work at pace to close loopholes in the law on taxi licensing.
Finally, I want to respond to 3 other important issues identified by Baroness Casey in her report but where she has not made specific recommendations.
On support for victims, my Right Honourable Friend the Health Secretary will fund additional training for mental health staff in schools on identifying and supporting children and young people who have experienced trauma, exploitation and abuse.
Secondly. Baroness Casey reports that she came across cases involving suspects who were asylum seekers. We have asked her team to provide to the Home Office all the evidence that they found, so that Immigration Enforcement can immediately pursue individual cases with the police.
But let me make clear. Those who groom children or commit sexual offences will not be granted asylum in the UK. We will do everything in our power to remove them. I do not believe the law is strong enough, that we have inherited, so we are bringing forward a change to the law, so that anyone convicted of sexual offences is excluded from the asylum system and denied refugee status.
We have already increased the removal of foreign national offenders by 14% since the election and we are drawing up new arrangements to identify and remove those who have committed a much wider range of offences.
Finally, Baroness Casey describes ways in which patterns of grooming gang child sexual exploitation are changing.
Including evidence of rape and sexual exploitation taking place in street gangs and drug gangs, that combine criminal and sexual exploitation.
I do not believe that this kind of exploitation has been sufficiently investigated.
It also describes sexual exploitation in modern slavery and trafficking cases.
And most significant of all it describes the huge increase in online grooming and horrendous sexual exploitation and abuse – including the use of social media apps to build up relationships and lure children into physical abuse.
The audit quotes one police expert saying, “If Rotherham were to happen again today it would start online.”
Mr Speaker, we are also passing world-leading new laws to target those who groom and exploit children online and investing in cutting edge technology to target the highest-harm offenders but we will need to do much more or the new scandals and shameful crimes of the future will be missed.
When the final report of Alexis Jay’s 7-year national inquiry was published in October 2022, the then Home Secretary, Grant Shapps, issued a profound and formal public apology to the victims of child sexual abuse so badly let down over decades by different levels of the state.
As Shadow Home Secretary at that time I joined him in that apology on behalf of the Opposition and extended it to victims of child sexual exploitation too.
To the victims and survivors of sexual exploitation and grooming gangs, on behalf of this and past governments and the many public authorities who let you down, I want to reiterate an unequivocal apology for the unimaginable pain and suffering you have suffered and the failure of our country’s institutions through decades to prevent that harm and keep you safe.
But words are not enough. Victims and survivors need action.
The reforms I have set out today will mean the strongest action any government has taken to tackle child sexual exploitation
More police investigations, more arrests, a new inquiry, changes to the law to protect children, and a fundamental overhaul of the way organisations work to support victims and put perpetrators behind bars.
But none of this will work unless everyone is part of it. Unless everyone works together to keep our children safe.
I commend this statement to the House.
