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UK home secretary Yvette Cooper has announced new government-backed local inquiries into grooming gangs, as she seeks to draw a line under a furore surrounding the decade-old scandal that was reignited by Elon Musk.
The government will provide £5mn in funding for up to five locally led inquiries into historic grooming cases, including one in Oldham, she said on Thursday.
The new local inquiries are expected to follow the model of a judge-led inquiry that took place into grooming gangs in Telford.
The scandal — in which gangs of predominantly men of Pakistani origin groomed and raped girls who were largely white — emerged in the 2010s, leading to several inquiries.
The issue re-emerged this month after Elon Musk posted on social media platform X about the scandal and called for a national inquiry, a demand that was echoed by the Conservative party and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Cooper also said she had asked Baroness Louise Casey, who wrote a report into child exploitation in Rotherham in 2015, to oversee a rapid audit of the current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country.
“It will properly examine ethnicity data and the demographics of the gangs involved and their victims, and it will look at the cultural and societal drivers for this type of offending including among different ethnic groups,” she told the House of Commons.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the moves did not go far enough.
Following a speech in Westminster on Thursday she said she welcomed “any work that Louise Casey is doing to do in this area of the rape gangs”, but added: “Oldham has decided not to do a local inquiry and has asked for a national inquiry because it knows that local inquiries are limited.”
Repeating her call for a national inquiry, she said: “It doesn’t need to take forever, it can have a limited terms of reference.”
Badenoch also defended the Conservatives’ failure to launch a nationwide probe while in power, insisting it became clear one was needed only as the local inquiry conclusions came in.
“We did some things, but as the results came in, my view is we should have done more,” she said.
