Labour’s response to grooming gangs misses the point – why would councils want to expose their own failings?
Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips photographed leaving 10 Downing Street, January 2025 (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
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Since the present government has made much of its commitment to tackling violence against women and girls, I genuinely assumed it would prioritise the scourge of ongoing, organised grooming gangs, raping some of the most vulnerable in society.
Yet it took Elon Musk’s somewhat graceless intervention to catapult the issue into national – even international – headlines and force a somewhat grudging policy response.
The fact that these monstrous gangs are still operating led to a public clamour for a national inquiry. Instead, in January, the government announced a meagre five local inquiries, crucially with no power to compel witnesses to give evidence. Worse, on the day Parliament broke for Easter recess, safeguarding minister Jess Phillips sneaked in an announcement of an apparent further watering down: she seemed to say there would only be one local inquiry, in Oldham, while other councils would be offered more “bespoke” (toothless?) alternatives. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper later clarified that the government is still “drawing up the framework for further local inquiries”.
The authorities, from local social services to the police, knew what was going on but didn’t act
Ms Phillips’ explanations for the “flexible approach” being offered to councils were telling. It’s due to “feedback from local authorities”. But why would councils endorse investigations into their own shortcomings? In the Lords, Lord Hanson of Flint presented access to the £5m fund as though it were a windfall grant that LAs would clamour to access. But how will an opt-in approach force any council, such as Bradford – which has constantly rebuffed any inquiry and point-blank denied the horrors perpetrated under its watch – to act, given vested interest in hiding their own failings?
I realised that the government doesn’t understand what makes this an open sore in many communities when Ms Phillips boasted of the numbers arrested by the grooming gangs’ taskforce. Yes, seeing the abusers brought to justice is important. But a key grievance is that local state agencies have been implicated in cover-ups and got off scot-free. Also, the scale of the abuse – and therefore significantly of official failures – is far greater than ministers acknowledge. GB News reporter Charlie Peters has identified 50 towns and cities where gangs have operated. That’s tens of thousands of unacknowledged victims betrayed.
One of Ms Phillips’ solutions: a new mandatory duty to report child sexual abuse to “create a culture of openness and honesty, rather than cover-ups and secrecy”. Yet with these grooming gangs, reporting happened frequently. Still these men got away with their heinous crimes. The authorities, from local social services to the police, knew what was going on but didn’t act. If we seriously want to end “cover-ups and secrecy”, we must understand who and why. An urgent, fast-tracked national inquiry with statutory powers would help establish fact over speculation.
What we do know, from limited investigations such as the Telford inquiry, court testimonies, brave whistleblowers such as former police officer Maggie Oliver, the victims’ own testimonies, and the valiant work of a handful of investigative journalists: seemingly these were the wrong kind of victims and the wrong kind of perpetrators, at odds with political priorities. The decades-long sexual abuse of thousands of young white girls at the hands of groups of largely British Pakistani men (often feared and despised within their own community) disturbed the multiculturalism narrative. Speaking out was discouraged for fear of being accused of Islamophobic racism or of dangerously stirring up community tensions.
More recently the scandal has descended into party political finger-pointing. Labour is accused of covering up the cover-ups by Labour councils; Conservatives are accused of opportunism for only highlighting grooming gangs now in opposition. But this is beyond party politics. After all, it was a Labour MP, Ann Cryer, who first raised concerns about groups of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men preying on working-class white girls in her Keighley constituency more than 20 years ago. She was dismissed as a racist. Plus ça change. But change is needed now.
Decades into the grooming gangs scandal, it isn’t going away. It won’t until politicians face up to uncomfortable truths and those in positions of authority are held to account for any complicity and negligence.
Baroness Fox is a non-affiliated peer
