There will be more inquiries into grooming gangs after all – just not a full public inquiry. Yvette Cooper has just announced in the Commons that there will be five new local inquiries, including one in Oldham which triggered the most recent row on these crimes. The Home Secretary also announced that Louise Casey is going to conduct a rapid review into grooming gangs, looking at the data on these crimes, to see what can be learned at a national level. She told MPs:
‘As well as reviewing past cases we also need much stronger action to uncover the full scale and nature of these crimes… The data on ethnicity of both perpetrators and victims is still inadequate.’
She added that, ‘in order to go much further, I have asked Baroness Louise Casey to oversee a rapid audit of the current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country and to make further recommendations on the work that is needed.’
Cooper also said there would be a clear timetable by Easter for implementing the remaining recommendations of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, and that the government would be implementing all the recommendations from the IICSA report on grooming gangs.
This is all quite significant and does go a good way to addressing many of the problems that other politicians have said a public inquiry could uncover. Kemi Badenoch, for instance, has complained that no one is joining up the dots to look at where grooming and rape of children by gangs is happening and how many victims there may be. But as MPs like Sarah Champion (who has campaigned on this even when it was damaging to her career to do so) pointed out, one of the things the local inquiries would not be able to do would be to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath, which does limit their scope.
When shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp gave his response, it was in part an attack on Keir Starmer for initially suggesting that anyone calling for a public inquiry was jumping on a ‘far-right bandwagon’ and also to plead the Conservatives’ case after Cooper had once again accused them of not doing enough when they were in power.
Once again, though, Philp had to accept that one of the reasons the previous Conservative government had failed to implement the IICSA recommendations was that there had been an election, something that was entirely self-inflicted by the Conservatives rather than a random act of God.
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