The key question underlying Badenoch’s call for grooming gangs probe

Good morning. Why is Tulip Siddiq still a Treasury minister? What is the government’s plan to improve schools once the Schools and Wellbeing Bill passes into law?

These are pressing questions. Our system relies on the opposition of the day to ask and prosecute them. Is the campaign that Kemi Badenoch is instead waging, for a further inquiry into child sexual abuse in the UK, serious?

Well, that it started with the Conservative leadership demanding that the government publish data it had already published in November is not a great sign. Badenoch’s bill amendment yesterday was the first time MPs had a chance to look at a more detailed proposal from her. Some thoughts on what it was below.

Behind Badenoch’s bid

Here is the wording of the wrecking amendment that Kemi Badenoch laid before the House yesterday to “bring about a national inquiry into grooming gangs”. A total of 364 MPs voted against the amendment, while 111 were in favour. This is the full text but I have bolded the relevant part:

This House, while welcoming measures to improve child protection and safeguarding, declines to give a Second Reading to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill because it undermines the long-standing combination of school freedom and accountability that has led to educational standards rising in England, effectively abolishes academy freedoms which have been integral to that success and is regressive in approach, leading to worse outcomes for pupils; because it ends freedom over teacher pay and conditions, making it harder to attract and retain good teachers; because it ends freedom over Qualified Teacher Status, making teacher recruitment harder; because it removes school freedoms over the curriculum, leading to less innovation; because repealing the requirements for failing schools to become academies and for all new schools to be academies will undermine school improvement and remove the competition which has led to rising standards; because the Bill will make it harder for good schools to expand, reducing parental choice and access to a good education; and calls upon the Government to develop new legislative proposals for children’s wellbeing including establishing a national statutory inquiry into historical child sexual exploitation, focused on grooming gangs.

Kemi Badenoch argues that the reason why the 2022 inquiry led by Alexis Jay — commissioned by the last Tory government — was inadequate is that it treated all unreported and unpunished child sexual abuse cases that have emerged into the light in recent years as part of the same big story.

In her view, the mistake of the Jay inquiry (whose terms of reference were set by a government in which she was a power player) was in investigating the grooming scandal alongside 14 other cases of child sexual abuse, including but not limited to: child sexual abuse in the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church, in children’s homes in Nottinghamshire, in care homes in Lambeth, to foster children sent overseas — predominantly to Australia — to foster families and institutions by the UK government, the abuse of young boys by the then MP for Rochdale, Cyril Smith, in Rochdale and the surrounding areas, and of young people in youth offender centres.

She argues that this means that distinctive and important features of the grooming gangs scandal have been missed. And that there has been a failure to “join the dots”. Is she right?

I am dubious that when you largely have the same outcome, you can usefully attack the problem by endlessly searching for bespoke solutions for each local variation. There are always some differences. But in general, where you find similar outcomes, you find similar causes and similar remedies. It seems unlikely to me that the reason why Cyril Smith was able to abuse young boys in Rochdale for so long and why grooming gangs were able to do the same thing in Oldham are radically different, and that they will be solved by radically different means.

As it happens, that is also the view of the police, who shortly after Rishi Sunak established the “grooming gangs task force” renamed the force the “child sexual exploitation task force” because the police believe these problems cannot be understood or solved separately from one another. Chris Philp, now the shadow home secretary, but then the policing minister, does not appear to have opposed this change.

Given, however, that on Monday evening Philp was demanding in the House of Commons that the task force’s data be published (it had been) and asking whether the specialist team would continue (something the government confirmed at the same time as publishing the data), it may be that his grip on what was happening in his department as policing minister was not as firm as we might have hoped.

Neither I, nor the police, are infallible. The truth is we cannot say for sure whether the police view (that you have to understand grooming gangs as part of child sexual exploitation) or the Badenoch view (that you need to separate grooming gangs from the rest of child sexual exploitation) is right.

The reason for that is one important shared aspect of all 15 cases: bureaucratic indifference to the victims. One manifestation of that was inadequate data collection about the identities of victims and perpetrators. As a result, we do not have a clear picture of the age, gender and ethnicity of either group. We simply do not know as much about these scandals as we should.

Thanks to the improvements in data collection recommended in Jay’s review, in November we got detailed, high quality data about 115,489 cases of child sexual abuse in England and Wales, of which 4,228 were “group-based”.

Many of the recommended changes in the last inquiry have not yet happened. My feeling is that only when we have sufficiently implemented its findings will we be able to make a data-led assessment about how we should understand and address this problem — and whether or not grooming gangs should be viewed as part of the broader category of child sexual exploitation. From there we would be in a better position to conduct a useful and meaningful inquiry.

In our poll yesterday on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill, 73 per cent of you said you would not support it as it stands. Some 13 per cent of you said you would support it and 14 per cent were on the fence. Thanks for voting.

Now try this

I saw A Real Pain at the cinema yesterday: a perfectly constructed film about two American cousins travelling to Poland to visit the concentration camp their deceased grandmother escaped from. With its combination of depth, humour and seriousness, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Top stories today

• Mastermind of none | Elon Musk has privately discussed with allies how Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election, according to people briefed on the matter. FT analysis of Musk’s X feed found his obsession with UK politics is being fuelled by a series of popular accounts.

• Long-term sick days | The average number of long-term sick days missed by civil servants each year has hit a post-pandemic high, according to new figures revealed by the Cabinet Office.

• ‘The report came out at an unfortunate time’ | The UK government would have to pay between £5bn and £10bn to compensate thousands of victims of child sexual abuse if it fully implements the recommendations from Professor Alexis Jay’s 2022 review, according to Whitehall estimates.

• Blow to Reeves’ budget plans? | Less than three months after delivering her first Budget, Rachel Reeves is running into treacherous fiscal waters as rising UK borrowing costs erode her room for manoeuvre.

• Lettuce go | Liz Truss has sent a cease and desist letter to Keir Starmer demanding that he stops claiming she crashed the economy, the Telegraph’s Ben Riley-Smith and Tim Wallace report. In the letter, a copy of which has been seen by the newspaper, lawyers acting on behalf of the former prime minister argue the statement is “false and defamatory”.

• Badenoch hasn’t met grooming gang survivors | Kemi Badenoch has never actually met any survivors of grooming gangs, her spokesman has admitted – and she doesn’t think she needs to, the Mirror’s Mikey Smith reveals. Her spokesman told reporters today that she had no current plans to meet with any victims, nor had any asked to meet with her.