Remember grooming gangs? Last week’s big story has amazingly already been superseded by other political rows, but they came up again at Home Office questions in the Commons this afternoon.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp used his topical question to ask Yvette Cooper whether she now agreed with Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and Liverpool Walton MP Dan Carden that there should be a ‘proper national public inquiry’. Cooper did not agree in her response, but equally she didn’t rule out an inquiry, showing how far the government has had to shift from its initial adamant position that those calling for an inquiry were jumping on a ‘far-right bandwagon’.
Presumably ministers have had to recognise that despite Burnham’s fondness for travelling by bandwagon, he hasn’t yet bought a ticket for one driven by the far right.
Philp pointed out that the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse only briefly covered the gangs, and was continuing to argue his case when the Speaker cut him off for going on too long.
In reply, the Home Secretary said:
‘These are horrendous crimes involving rape, sadistic violence and cruelty, exploitation, intimidation and coercion. So we need action, truth and accountability for these terrible crimes. That is why we support further investigations, inquiries, and action into child sexual exploitation and grooming gangs, including new action to get police reporting evidence on the scale of grooming gangs including ethnicity which is still not being done and the most important thing is to get more police investigations to get these criminals behind bars.’
As a measure of how far the issue has plummeted down the agenda, Philp didn’t use his second question as a shadow cabinet minister to follow up, instead turning to Tulip Siddiq and whether she should step back from her job as anti-corruption minister while being investigated. Earlier in the session, Philp had asked about small boat crossings, which has gone back to being the main topic of attacks from across the House, along with new stories, such as the one raised by Reform deputy leader Richard Tice, who asked about the UAE listing eight UK companies as terror groups.
Some MPs did raise grooming gangs. Liberal Democrat Danny Chambers asked whether the government would commit to implementing all the recommendations in Alexis Jay’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual abuse. Phillips replied that she had ‘spent my weekend in fact in my own surgery dealing with cases as live today around grooming of both boys and girls by organised groups of varying different sorts’. She added that it was 15 years since the original Jay report into Rotherham and that the government would work ‘at pace’ to ‘make sure that what was intended by those recommendations [in the IICSA report] can happen, I will do it as quickly as can possibly be done but I will not do what has previously been done by the previous government is just say, yeah, sure, and then leave it to chance.’
Conservative Danny Kruger asked whether she agreed that one of the ways to stop ‘the next child rape gang’ was to ensure that all cases of a child having intercourse with an adult were investigated, rather than there being an assumption that any children could consent. Phillips agreed and said ‘the boyfriend model of consent to get the young people into these groups is undoubtedly one of the most common’, and that every case should be ‘investigated, charged and convicted’.
Lib Dem Lisa Smart asked for a timeline on implementing the duty of candour law – not the sort of sound-and-fury question we heard so much of last week, but much more important, given governments do have a habit of announcing they are going to do something and then taking years to manage to do it.
Then the questions moved on. This won’t be the last we hear about grooming gangs, but it was striking how little MPs already feel they have left to say about the issue.
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