Casey wants 'national reset' on grooming gangs

Dame Louise Casey has called for a newly-announced inquiry into grooming gangs to be used as a "moment to have a national reset" on the issue.

The crossbench peer's report into the nature and scale of group-based child sexual abuse in England and Wales paved the way for a new national inquiry announced at the weekend by Sir Keir Starmer.

Baroness Casey urged those called to give evidence to the inquiry to be open to scrutiny and change.

She told the Commons home affairs committee she wanted the government to "crack on" with the inquiry, suggesting it could be completed within three years, with regular updates before the final report.

She was also quizzed by MPs about her report's finding that the ethnicity of people involved in grooming gangs had been "shied away from" by the authorities.

The peer urged people to "keep calm" on the subject of ethnicity.

Pointing out that her report had said data on the ethnicity of perpetrators was "incomplete and unreliable", she said: "If you look at the data on child sexual exploitation, suspects and offenders, it's disproportionately Asian heritage.

"If you look at the data for child abuse, it is not disproportionate, and it is white men.

"So again, just [a] note to everybody really, outside here rather than in here, let's just keep calm here about how you interrogate data and what you draw from it."

Concern about child sexual exploitation and grooming gangs stretches back to 2010, when five men from the Asian community in Rotherham were jailed for sexual offences against underage girls.

A local inquiry uncovered widescale abuse in the town, where it was estimated 1,400 children were exploited between 1997 and 2013, predominantly by men of Pakistani heritage.

The report's author, Baroness Jay, went on to produce a report in 2022 that warned of "endemic" abuse in communities across England and Wales, but its 20 recommendations have yet to be fully implemented.

Baroness Casey praised Baroness Jay's work and stressed the need for action, and not words, from political leaders.

She said she did not think it was "unreasonable" to hold the government to account in six months' time on whether her 12 recommendations have been implemented.

"I hope this is a line in the sand, and I think the 12 things that we're asking for are not impossible.

"They're not pipe dreams, they're achievable."

She also told the committee she would like to see "quite a significant uplift in the prosecutions, the action, the criminal investigations on child sexual exploitation, both historic and current".

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has said the government will follow all 12 of the report's recommendations, including suggestions to:

• Ensure adults who engage in penetrative sex with a child under 16 "face the most serious charge of rape" instead of lesser charges
• Launch a new national criminal operation overseen by the National Crime Agency (NCA) to tackle grooming gangs and hold a national inquiry that co-ordinates targeted local investigations into abuse
• Review the criminal convictions of victims of child sexual exploitation and quashing any convictions where the government finds victims were criminalised instead of protected
• Make the collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases mandatory
• Commission research into the drivers for group-based child sexual exploitation, including the role of social media, cultural factors and group dynamics.

Baroness Casey told BBC Newsnight she was "disappointed" by the politicisation of her report, adding that she felt opposition parties could have "come together" behind the government.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused Sir Keir Starmer of politicising the issue when he said in January that those calling for a national inquiry were "jumping on a bandwagon" and "amplifying" the demands of the far right.

She said: "I do think that we should take the politics out of it.

"But who was it that said when we raised this issue, that we were pandering to the far right? That's what brought the politics into it."

Speaking at a news conference alongside survivors and family members, she added: "I'm not doing politics now, when I'm in the Houses of Parliament, when I'm in the Commons, I will do politics."

Pressed over whether the Tories owed survivors an apology for not doing more to tackle grooming gangs when they were in power, Badenoch said: "We have done that… I have spoken to [survivors] about this.

"I have apologised. But what I find extraordinary is that more people are interested in prosecuting a government that did some things, did not conclude, rather than looking at what needs to happen right now."

Badenoch backed the three-year timescale proposed by Baroness Casey for the national inquiry into grooming gangs as "reasonable" - having previously called for it to be done within two years.