Parliament’s last day before recess is usually a dull affair. A one-line whip allows MPs to return to their constituencies early and the matters for debate are deliberately parochial. When the Commons rose for Easter this week, the government could have expected attention to have been even more desultory than normal, since politicians and the media were focused on the fallout from Donald Trump’s global tariff war. Which is why it is all the more concerning that the Home Office chose that afternoon to slip out the announcement that it was retreating from its commitment to investigate the operations of grooming gangs in five local authorities. Someone must have thought it was a good day to bury bad news.
The government’s new approach to grooming gangs is an invitation to the guilty to evade their day in court
The commitment being watered down was already thin gruel. Rather than establish a national inquiry – as the opposition requested in January – into a scandal that ruined the lives of thousands of young women, the government opted for five discrete local investigations and pledged £5 million to support them. Seeing as the investigative work of GB News reporter Charlie Peters had established that grooming gangs operated in 50 towns and cities across the country, the selection of just five for scrutiny was inadequate. Given that a past inquiry into child sexual abuse in just one local authority, Telford, cost £8 million, the sums allocated for investigation were insultingly paltry.
Initially, though, there was the hope of some rigour being applied to the process. In January, a respected KC, Thomas Crowther, was appointed to draft the framework for the inquiries. This raised the prospect of an attempt to hold local authorities accountable for their failures.
Now even that hope has been extinguished.
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