Baroness Casey, whose national audit of child sexual exploitation was published yesterday afternoon, has today claimed that “it is clear” grooming gangs are still operating in Britain. Addressing the Home Affairs Committee in Parliament this morning, Casey, who serves as the Government’s lead non-executive director, said that “people don’t necessarily look hard enough to find these children in particular”, and that collecting incomplete data on the ethnicity of perpetrators has been “a bloody disaster”.

Casey’s report has prompted widespread criticism of the response of Keir Starmer’s government to the scandal, given that Labour ministers have this year dismissed the need for a national inquiry into the grooming gangs and called references to perpetrators’ race a “dogwhistle”. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper yesterday apologized in the House of Commons for the British state’s failure to protect young girls who were systematically raped by organised gangs of mainly Pakistani men, acknowledging that Casey’s audit had exposed “a timeline of failure from 2009-25”.

In 2015, Casey authored a report into the response of children’s services and local authorities to child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. Seven years later, the social work adviser Alexis Jay published the findings of a nationwide investigation into safeguarding failures around the rape gangs, which Starmer cited in January as a reason not to conduct a new national inquiry. Casey told the Home Affairs Committee this morning that she previously shared the Prime Minister’s doubt but has now changed her view, highlighting the need for “accountability”.

Before her appearance in Parliament, Casey last night criticized Conservative Party politicians for their “politicisation” of the scandal. Speaking on the BBC’s Newsnight, she said she was “disappointed” that the Opposition had sought to make political capital from Labour’s failures, adding: “wouldn’t it be great if everybody came behind [the new national inquiry] and just backed it and got on with it?”

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch today held her own press conference alongside abuse survivors and their family members, in which she reiterated that grooming gang crime is “still ongoing” and that “a national inquiry is critical” for justice. She also stated that “the scale of this is much bigger than any of us envisaged even as we were looking at it,” and that she has herself personally apologized to victims. Badenoch denied Casey’s charge that she had politicized the issue, insisting: “Who was it who said this was dog-whistle politics? It was Keir Starmer and his ministers […] as Leader of the Opposition it is my job to hold the Government to account.”

The 2022 Jay report stated that “it is simply not possible to know the scale of child sexual exploitation by networks” in Britain. Tens of thousands of young girls are thought to have been abused across towns such as Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford, with some estimates exceeding 100,000 over several decades. Between 2005 and 2017, only 264 men were convicted for these crimes. “This is one of the biggest scandals that Britain has ever seen,” Badenoch said this morning. In her audit, Casey called it “one of the most horrendous crimes in our society”.

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is UnHerd’s Deputy Editor, Newsroom.

RobLownie

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