UK home secretary apologises over child grooming gang scandal

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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 accepted 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 that 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 that the failure to address questions regarding the ethnicity of perpetrators had done a “disservice to victims”. She said: “The appalling lack of data on ethnicity in crime recording alone is a major failing over the last decade or more.”

She said she had been “outraged, shocked and appalled” at the treatment of victims by authorities that were supposed to be protecting them.

“We are talking about multiple sexual assaults committed against children by multiple men on multiple occasions, beatings and gang rapes,” Casey added.

Downing Street said Sir Keir Starmer believed 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 criticised Britain’s handling of the scandal. 

Downing Street said Starmer’s “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 done by Alexis Jay, who carried out an independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. Her work included a strand on grooming gangs.

Cooper said she accepted Casey’s recommendation that the law should be tightened up to make it clear that “an adult having penetrative sex with a child under 16 is rape, no excuses, no defence”.