Keir Starmer defends U-turn on grooming gangs inquiry

Sir Keir Starmer has defended his choice to carry a nationwide inquiry into grooming gangs after beforehand accusing these calling for one among leaping on a far proper bandwagon.

The prime minister instructed the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason he had commissioned Dame Louise Casey to jot down a report back to “double examine” the problem and “having learn it I agreed along with her conclusion”.

“That, to me, is a sensible, widespread sense manner of doing politics,” he added.

Baroness Casey stated she needed the inquiry to create a “nationwide reset” on the grooming gangs challenge and urged officers giving proof to it to be “open” to scrutiny and alter.

The Whitehall troubleshooter – who has labored on social points for successive prime ministers since Tony Blair within the Nineties – can also be chairing an impartial fee into grownup social care.

She put this on maintain in January to hold out an audit of the character and scale of group-based youngster sexual abuse in England and Wales.

It got here amid renewed concern about grooming gangs, sparked partly by tech tycoon Elon Musk.

Labour ministers repeatedly rejected Conservative and Reform UK requires a nationwide inquiry into the problem, asserting as a substitute that there could be 5 native inquiries.

Baroness Casey stated she modified her thoughts on the necessity for a nationwide inquiry after being “unimpressed” that extra native councils didn’t volunteer to arrange their very own inquiries and a few organisations have been reluctant to speak to her personal investigators.

Her report recommends each a nationwide police operation to evaluation circumstances of kid exploitation not acted on, in addition to a nationwide inquiry.

It says this is able to be overseen by an Impartial Fee, with full powers to compel witnesses to offer proof.

In January, Sir Keir accused these calling for a nationwide inquiry of “leaping on a bandwagon” and “amplifying” the calls for of the far proper.

Requested why he had stated this, the PM instructed reporters he had been “calling out” politicians – comparable to Conservative chief Kemi Badenoch – “who in energy had stated and performed nothing, who are actually making the claims that they make”.

Baroness Casey’s report additionally highlights poor information assortment on the ethnicity of perpetrators and suggests officers had “shied away” from the problem.

The report says that at a neighborhood stage for 3 police forces – Higher Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire – there was sufficient proof to point out a “disproportionate numbers of males from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based youngster sexual exploitation”.

Labour’s safeguarding minister Jess Phillips urged in an interview with BBC Newsnight that some in Labour had put their heads within the sand over the ethnicity challenge, though she insisted she had by no means “turned a blind eye” to it.

Requested about this, Sir Keir instructed the BBC: “I’ve lengthy been involved about individuals sticking their heads within the sand about all types of points in relation to youngster sexual abuse.”

He stated the nationwide inquiry “should go wherever it must go, whether or not that is a query of ethnicity or the function of public officers”.

Concern about youngster sexual exploitation and grooming gangs stretches again to 2010, when 5 males from the Asian neighborhood in Rotherham have been jailed for sexual offences in opposition to underage ladies.

A neighborhood inquiry uncovered widescale abuse within the city, the place it was estimated 1,400 kids have been exploited between 1997 and 2013, predominantly by males of Pakistani heritage.

The report’s writer, Baroness Jay, went on to provide a report in 2022 that warned of “endemic” abuse in communities throughout England and Wales, however its 20 suggestions have but to be totally applied.

Baroness Casey stated she didn’t suppose it was “unreasonable” to carry the federal government to account in six months’ time on whether or not the additional 12 suggestions in her personal report had been applied.

She instructed MPs on the Dwelling Affairs Committee she want to see “fairly a major uplift within the prosecutions, the motion, the legal investigations on youngster sexual exploitation, each historic and present”.

Baroness Casey additionally burdened the significance of the report’s name to make sure adults who interact in penetrative intercourse with a baby beneath 16 “face probably the most severe cost of rape” as a substitute of lesser costs.

And she or he urged individuals to “preserve calm” concerning the topic of ethnicity.

She instructed MPs: “In case you take a look at the info on youngster sexual exploitation, suspects and offenders, it is disproportionately Asian heritage.

“In case you take a look at the info for youngster abuse, it isn’t disproportionate, and it’s white males.”

She added: “Let’s simply preserve calm right here about the way you interrogate information and what you draw from it.”

Baroness Casey instructed BBC Newsnight she was “disenchanted” by the politicisation of her report, including that she felt opposition events may have “come collectively” behind the federal government.

Conservative chief Kemi Badenoch, talking at a press convention with abuse survivors, stated: “I do suppose that we must always take the politics out of it.

“However who was it that stated after we raised this challenge, that we have been pandering to the far proper? That is what introduced the politics into it.”

Pressed over whether or not the Tories owed survivors an apology for not doing extra to sort out grooming gangs after they have been in energy, Badenoch stated: “I’ve apologised. However what I discover extraordinary is that extra persons are fascinated by prosecuting a authorities that did some issues, didn’t conclude, reasonably than taking a look at what must occur proper now.”

Badenoch backed the three-year timescale proposed by Baroness Casey for the nationwide inquiry into grooming gangs as “cheap” – having beforehand referred to as for it to be performed inside two years.