Tories claim hundreds of officials, police officers and councillors should be jailed over grooming gangs cover-up
Good morning. All governments have to perform U-turns from time to time and over the weekend Keir Starmer had to stage another, announcing that he would order a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. Although Starmer can argue that he never firmly ruled out an inquiry, and that he is just responding to a recommendation from a short, evidence-based audit of “our understanding of the scale, nature and drivers” of grooming gang abuse conducted by Louise Casey, this is still embarrassing because it is an obvious victory for Kemi Badenoch, Reform UK and Elon Musk (probably the prime mover in this) who were aggressively lobbying for a national inquiry in the new year. Badenoch is now saying Starmer should apologise for not agreeing with her more swiftly. As explained last week, when the opposition has to resort to demanding an apology, that is normally a sign of weakness, not strength, because it means it is running out of proper grievances to pursue. But this remains difficult territory for Labour. The No 10 press operation will be grateful that it has been quite low down the news agenda because of what is happening in the Middle East.
Here is Aletha Adu’s overnight story.
And here is an analysis by Peter Walker, who is with Starmer at the G7 in Canada and who explains how Starmer broke the news about the inquiry in a huddle with reporters on the plane crossing the Atlantic.
And here are the key developments this morning.
The NCA will work in partnership with police forces around the country and specialist officers from the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce, Operation Hydrant – which supports police forces to address all complex and high profile cases of child sexual abuse – and the Tackling Organised Exploitation Programme.
Their job will be to give victims of these horrific crimes, whose cases were not progressed through the criminal justice system, long-awaited justice and prevent more children from being hurt by these vile criminals.
This will build on action already taken by the government to see offenders locked up. Police have already reopened over 800 historic cases of group-based child sexual abuse since the home secretary asked them in January to look again at cases that were closed too early and victims denied justice.
-
The Home Office is due to publish the Casey report into the grooming gangs. Casey was asked at the start of the year to “uncover the nature, scale and profile of group based CSEA [child sexual exploitation and abuse] offending”, to provide evidence about the ethnicity of offenders, and to consider “the cultural and societal drivers for this type of offending and the motivations and characteristics of grooming gang offending”.
-
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, has claimed that there could be hundreds of people who deserve to go to jail for covering up grooming gang abuse. In an interview with Sky News defending the need for an inquiry, Philp said:
What I’ve heard in the last few months, meeting retired police officers and meeting survivors, and what has really shocked me, has been the way that this was deliberately covered up over years and possibly decades.
It wasn’t that people were just negligent or just didn’t look into it properly. They deliberately and actively covered it up. I’m talking about senior police officers, local council leaders, social services, the Crown Prosecution Service.
And the reason they deliberately covered it up for years was because the victims were mainly very young white girls, often from troubled backgrounds, from care homes and so on, whereas the perpetrators were mainly of Pakistani heritage. And people in authority at the time were more concerned about so-called race relations than they were about protecting young girls …
There’s a criminal offence called misconduct in public office, and I think those people – and I’m not talking about handful, it is probably dozens or maybe hundreds of people in positions of authority over the years – deliberately covered this up. I think they are guilty of that criminal offence and frankly should be going to prison.
As an example, Philp cited evidence given by John Piekos, a former police office who says that, after he left the force and tried to get the police in West Yorkshire to investigate grooming at a children’s home in Bradford, he was told by a serving police officer and a council official to drop the case.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, gives a speech promising a “national project of renewal”.
Morning: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor (who was also promising renewal in her spending review last week), is on a visit in the north-east of England, promoting plans to improve the road network/
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
After 3.30pm: David Lammy, the foreign secretary, and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, are due to make Commons statement, on the Israel/Iran conflict, and the inquiry into grooming gangs respectively. But we are not sure yet which is coming first, and, if the Speaker allows one or more urgent questions, they will come first.
Around 5pm (UK time): Keir Starmer is due to arrive at the G7 meeting in Canada.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
Ministers to extend parts of government covered by armed forces covenant
In a recent report the Commons defence committee said that the armed forces covenant, a legal promise to veterans saying that they should not lose out when accessing government services because of their service in the military, should be extended. It said:
While some people had positive experiences to share, a worrying number [of veterans] felt that the covenant had been ineffective—or worse yet, had been disregarded—when they had cited it. As a result, many continued to face disadvantages as a result of their service in areas like healthcare, education, employment and welfare ….
We welcome the government’s intention to extend the covenant legal duty, which currently requires some public service providers to give due regard to the covenant’s principles when providing certain housing, healthcare and education services. We conclude that this duty should be extended to all central government departments and the devolved administrations, and should cover the breadth of areas in which the Armed Forces community regularly experiences disadvantage.
Today the committee has published the government’s response to this report, which says ministers are accepting this recommendation. Tan Dhesi, the Labour chair of the committee, welcomed the move. He said:
The covenant is a solemn commitment that the servicemen and women who place their lives on the line for us should face no disadvantage due to their service – we need to make sure every part of government lives up to that commitment.
Danny Shaw, the home affairs commentator and former BBC journalist, says people should not get unreasonable ideas about what a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal might achieve. He has posted these on social media.
‘GROOMING GANGS’ – 5 KEY POINTS 1 National Inquiry must have tight parameters, terms of reference & be targeted.
Sprawling Child Sexual Abuse Inquiry lasted 7 years… Undercover Policing Inquiry 10 years & no end in sight…cost £170m so far (including £68m spent by police)..
2 Servicing the National Inquiry will draw police & local authority resources & staff away from other key work. It’s vital they are given funding to cover this…
3 National Inquiry mustn’t delay work implementing the 20 Child Sexual Abuse Inquiry recommendations…
4 The @ukhomeoffice must provide extra funding for separate @NCA_UK operation to re-investigate old cases & bring perpetrators to justice.
Public protection & child abuse teams are already severely overstretched & struggling with caseloads, poor IT & lack of digital capability
5 It’s important expectations aren’t raised about what can be achieved from National Inquiry & @NCA_UK operation.
Not every injustice will be uncovered.
Not every perpetrator will be identified & convicted.
Not everyone will have their day in court.
It is the middle of the night in Canada. But this morning Keir Starmer’s social media team have posted this on social media showing Starmer enjoying the scenery in Kananaskis, Alberta, before the G7 gets going there this morning.
Patients in England to get more access to clinical trials under proposals in 10-year health plan, DHSC says
Patients in England will be able to sign up to take part in clinical trials, potentially giving them access to new drugs, more easily under plans announced by the Department of Health and Social Care today. In a news release it says:
Patients will receive the most cutting-edge treatments years earlier than planned under the government’s 10-year health plan, which will speed-up clinical trials so the UK becomes a hotbed of innovation.
Millions of people will now be able to search for and sign up to lifechanging clinical trials, via the NIHR Be Part of Research service on the NHS App, allowing patients to browse and find the trials best suited to their interests and needs.
Eventually the plan will see the NHS App automatically match patients with studies based on their own health data and interests, sending push notifications to your phone about relevant new trials to sign up to.
The 10-year health plan is due to be published soon.
Under the plan, the department also wants to speed up the time it takes to set up a clinical trial. It says:
In recent years, the UK has fallen behind as a global destination for these trials, with patients and the wider economy missing out. It takes around 100 days to set up a trial in Spain, but around 250 days in the NHS. The plan will see commercial clinical trial set-up times fall to 150 days or less by March 2026 – this will be the most ambitious reduction in trial set-up times in British history.
Currently set up processes for clinical trials take too long as a result of unnecessary bureaucracy and duplication of activities across different agencies and sites.
Government will cut set up times for clinical trials. Currently, trials have to agree separate contracts with each part of the NHS they want to be involved. The plan will introduce a national standardised contract which can save months of wasted time, as well as simplifying paperwork to remove duplication on technical assurances.
John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, has announced this morning that the winter fuel payment will be paid to pensioners in Scotland in the same way that it is being paid in England and Wales, the Herald reports. Under devolution, the Scottish government operates its own version of the benefit and does not have to follow what England is doing. But Swinney has said that Scotland will follow the UK government, which announced details of its U-turn on this last week, and pay it this year to all pensioners with an income of £35,000 or less.
Labour MP welcomes news National Crime Agency to lead national operation against grooming gangs
On the Today programme Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham, said that initially she had been reluctant to support calls for a new inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. But she said she had changed her mind in the light of the public concern about the issue. She explained:
The thought of having another filled me with horror, and I was reluctant, but when I realised the overwhelming public concern, there’s a real sense justice has not been handed out fairly and there has been a cover-up and intense frustration that there are still victims and survivors who haven’t received justice.
Champion said she was happy to use the word “cover-up” because she thought there were people who blocked inquiries into abuse in a way that was, if not criminally negligent, was at least professionally negligent.
I have an intense frustration that, not the frontline staff but further up the management chain, there were people who were actively blocking reports, people who I think, if not held to a criminal standard, should be held to a professional standard for their negligence in protecting those children.
I saw people that would have faced the most criticism have left, took early retirement, changed to a different job and some are having very successful careers, and that’s an intense frustration when, because of their negligence, they have continued to let children be exposed and exploited.
She also said she was delighted by the news that the National Crime Agency is leading a national operation against groominng gangs. She said that the NCA had been operating for seven years in Rotherham on this problem and that she loved their approach. “We have seen them compleltely change the wway that policing is done locally,” she said. She praised them for being “100% victim-focused”.
Nazir Afzal, who was chief crown prosecutor for the north west of England from 2011 to 2015, told the Today programme this morning that he was concerned that the decision to hold a national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal could raise expectations that won’t be met. He explained:
People want accountability. I’m not sure people’s expectations will be realised.
Only criminal investigations can bring real accountability. That’s what needs to happen. Not just for those who offended, but also those who stood by and didn’t do what they were meant to do.
Unfortunately my experience with national inquiries is that they take forever and don’t deliver accountability.
Goverment announces £590m funding for Lower Thames crossing
Ministers have pledged another half a billion pounds for the Lower Thames crossing as part of the government’s 10-year plan for infrastructure, PA Media reports. PA says:
The further £590m – out of the budgets announced at last week’s spending review – will go towards the road crossing that will link Kent and Essex.
A new structures fund will also invest in repairing bridges, flyovers, tunnels and other transport infrastructure such as roads.
The Lower Thames crossing is aimed at reducing congestion on the Dartford Crossing, with a new motorway-style road.
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander has said that the project is “essential for improving the resilience of a key freight route and is critical to our long-term trade with Europe” and that it will “speed up the movement of goods from south-east England to the Midlands and the north, crucial to thousands of jobs and businesses”.
Tories claim hundreds of officials, police officers and councillors should be jailed over grooming gangs cover-up
Good morning. All governments have to perform U-turns from time to time and over the weekend Keir Starmer had to stage another, announcing that he would order a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. Although Starmer can argue that he never firmly ruled out an inquiry, and that he is just responding to a recommendation from a short, evidence-based audit of “our understanding of the scale, nature and drivers” of grooming gang abuse conducted by Louise Casey, this is still embarrassing because it is an obvious victory for Kemi Badenoch, Reform UK and Elon Musk (probably the prime mover in this) who were aggressively lobbying for a national inquiry in the new year. Badenoch is now saying Starmer should apologise for not agreeing with her more swiftly. As explained last week, when the opposition has to resort to demanding an apology, that is normally a sign of weakness, not strength, because it means it is running out of proper grievances to pursue. But this remains difficult territory for Labour. The No 10 press operation will be grateful that it has been quite low down the news agenda because of what is happening in the Middle East.
Here is Aletha Adu’s overnight story.
And here is an analysis by Peter Walker, who is with Starmer at the G7 in Canada and who explains how Starmer broke the news about the inquiry in a huddle with reporters on the plane crossing the Atlantic.
And here are the key developments this morning.
The NCA will work in partnership with police forces around the country and specialist officers from the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce, Operation Hydrant – which supports police forces to address all complex and high profile cases of child sexual abuse – and the Tackling Organised Exploitation Programme.
Their job will be to give victims of these horrific crimes, whose cases were not progressed through the criminal justice system, long-awaited justice and prevent more children from being hurt by these vile criminals.
This will build on action already taken by the government to see offenders locked up. Police have already reopened over 800 historic cases of group-based child sexual abuse since the home secretary asked them in January to look again at cases that were closed too early and victims denied justice.
-
The Home Office is due to publish the Casey report into the grooming gangs. Casey was asked at the start of the year to “uncover the nature, scale and profile of group based CSEA [child sexual exploitation and abuse] offending”, to provide evidence about the ethnicity of offenders, and to consider “the cultural and societal drivers for this type of offending and the motivations and characteristics of grooming gang offending”.
-
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, has claimed that there could be hundreds of people who deserve to go to jail for covering up grooming gang abuse. In an interview with Sky News defending the need for an inquiry, Philp said:
What I’ve heard in the last few months, meeting retired police officers and meeting survivors, and what has really shocked me, has been the way that this was deliberately covered up over years and possibly decades.
It wasn’t that people were just negligent or just didn’t look into it properly. They deliberately and actively covered it up. I’m talking about senior police officers, local council leaders, social services, the Crown Prosecution Service.
And the reason they deliberately covered it up for years was because the victims were mainly very young white girls, often from troubled backgrounds, from care homes and so on, whereas the perpetrators were mainly of Pakistani heritage. And people in authority at the time were more concerned about so-called race relations than they were about protecting young girls …
There’s a criminal offence called misconduct in public office, and I think those people – and I’m not talking about handful, it is probably dozens or maybe hundreds of people in positions of authority over the years – deliberately covered this up. I think they are guilty of that criminal offence and frankly should be going to prison.
As an example, Philp cited evidence given by John Piekos, a former police office who says that, after he left the force and tried to get the police in West Yorkshire to investigate grooming at a children’s home in Bradford, he was told by a serving police officer and a council official to drop the case.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, gives a speech promising a “national project of renewal”.
Morning: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor (who was also promising renewal in her spending review last week), is on a visit in the north-east of England, promoting plans to improve the road network/
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
After 3.30pm: David Lammy, the foreign secretary, and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, are due to make Commons statement, on the Israel/Iran conflict, and the inquiry into grooming gangs respectively. But we are not sure yet which is coming first, and, if the Speaker allows one or more urgent questions, they will come first.
Around 5pm (UK time): Keir Starmer is due to arrive at the G7 meeting in Canada.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.