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Home secretary Yvette Cooper has issued an “unequivocal apology” over the failure of the British state to protect young girls from predatory grooming gangs over 16 years, as she confirmed a full national inquiry into the scandal.
Cooper said she would accept all 12 recommendations from a wide-ranging inquiry by Baroness Louise Casey, who looked into the role of ethnicity in the scandal. A large proportion of the perpetrators were men from Asian ethnic backgrounds.
The home secretary said in future there would be a formal requirement for ethnicity and nationality data to be recorded in cases of child sexual exploitation, calling the failure to act decisively against the grooming gangs a “stain on our society”.
She said the 197-page Casey report, published on Monday was “damning”, exposing “deep rooted institutional failures” and a failure to “treat children as children”.
Cooper said some authorities were worried about “being seen as racist or inflaming community tensions”, and that Casey had unearthed “a timeline of failure from 2009-2025”.
The audit found the ethnicity of perpetrators had been “shied away from” and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, preventing an accurate assessment to be made from the nationally connected data.
Local inquiries into child sexual exploitation by groups of men have previously taken place in Birmingham, Oldham, Oxfordshire, Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford.
Seven men were recently found guilty of sexually abusing two girls between 2001 and 2006 in Rochdale, both of whom came from vulnerable backgrounds and were known to social services.
Despite the lack of national data, the existing evidence showed “disproportionate numbers” of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds among suspects as well as convicted perpetrators, the Casey audit said.
Casey added the failure to address questions regarding the ethnicity of perpetrators had done a “disservice to victims”.
Downing Street said that Sir Keir Starmer believes that “the grooming scandal was one of the greatest failures in our country’s history”, but the prime minister has come under heavy criticism for his failure to announce a national inquiry sooner.
Kemi Badenoch, Conservative leader, said Starmer and Cooper had committed “another U-turn” and that the prime minister was guilty of “an extraordinary failure of leadership”.
In January Starmer accused opposition MPs calling for a national inquiry of “jumping on a bandwagon” and “amplifying what the far right is saying”. Elon Musk, the US tech billionaire, had raised the scandal in a series of posts on X.
Asked whether Starmer regretted dismissing Tory and Reform UK calls for a national inquiry in January, Downing Street said his “bandwagon” comments were aimed at “ministers from the previous government who sat in office for years and did nothing to tackle this scandal”.
Number 10 said the national inquiry would be time limited and build on the work carried out by Alexis Jay, who carried out an independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. Her work included a strand on grooming gangs.
But Starmer’s spokesman said the new inquiry would “look specifically at how young girls were failed so badly by different agencies on a local level, strengthening the commitment we made at the start of this year to carry out locally led inquiries”.
“By setting up a new inquiry under the Inquiries Act with statutory powers to compel witnesses, the local authorities and institutions who fail to act to protect young people will not be able to hide and will finally be held to account for their action.”
