What a pig’s ear the government is making of its response to the grooming gangs scandal. Ministers have spent weeks resisting growing calls for a new and comprehensive national inquiry, insisting that this would take too long and get in the way of implementing measures to help victims. Now there’s been a change of heart, of sorts, because it has become all too obvious that the government is failing to win the political argument. The answer ministers have alighted upon to dig themselves out of a hole of their own making is unlikely to satisfy anyone for very long.
There still won’t be a national inquiry – lest anyone dares to accuse the government of reversing course – but there will now be a series of local inquiries. Ministers can try to dress this up any way they like but the new measures amount to a marked shift in approach, with the government forced to move further and faster than originally intended. It smacks of policymaking on the hoof, necessitated first and foremost by a desire to contain the growing political damage.
Ministers now realise, somewhat late in the day, that they will have to go further to show they are gripping the problem of child sexual exploitation
Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, outlined the details in the Commons. She announced that a series of government-backed local grooming inquiries would take place, alongside a separate three-month national audit into rape gangs. The reviews, Cooper explained, will be victim-led and tailored to local areas. Baroness Casey of Blackstock has been appointed to conduct a ‘rapid’ assessment of the scale and extent of gang-based exploitation, as well as its ‘cultural and societal drivers’. Cooper said Casey would be able to examine data not available to the earlier national inquiry into gangs conducted by Professor Alexis Jay. Chief constables will be given £2.5 million to review all cold cases of gang exploitation. £5 million has been allocated to set up local inquiries into grooming gangs in Oldham and four other areas, which have not been decided. What about all the other areas of the country? Gangs were believed to have operated in as many as 50 towns. Do the victims in these other areas not matter?
Ministers now realise, somewhat late in the day, that they will have to go further to show they are gripping the problem of child sexual exploitation. Cooper had been threatened with legal action by Maggie Oliver, a former detective who helped uncover widespread abuse in Rochdale before resigning from Greater Manchester Police in 2012. Oliver demanded that the Home Secretary take ‘urgent steps to allay widespread public concern’ over gangs exploiting children.
Pressure has also been mounting within the Labour party. Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, has called for a national inquiry. The loudest and most effective voice of all appears to have been Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and adviser to Donald Trump – a truth that is difficult for the government to swallow. It is unlikely that ministers would have acted so quickly without his repeated public interventions on the subject.
On his social media platform X, Musk had this to say in response to the announcement: ‘I hope this is a proper investigation. This is a step in the right direction, but the results will speak for themselves.’ That is indeed the nub of the issue.
The Home Secretary insists that local inquiries can ‘ delve into far more local detail and deliver more locally relevant answers, and change, than a lengthy nationwide inquiry can provide’. That interpretation is open to debate. Local investigations lack the power to compel witnesses to give evidence: only a national inquiry placed on a statutory footing has such powers. Furthermore, local inquiries are unable to take evidence under oath and cannot give legal immunity to victims. How then will the truth be established, of how and why so many children were failed by those in authority, especially if it involves possible cover-ups of past abuse by local officials or police officers?
Cooper might have good political reasons for deciding that this is the best way of proceeding but few independent observers are likely to agree. That is why the new measures are unlikely to quell the calls for another full national inquiry. Chris Philip, the shadow home secretary, condemned the plans as ‘wholly inadequate’. The Tory backbench MP, Bernard Jenkin, commented that the Home Secretary has ‘travelled a long way since last week’. The Home Secretary’s journey on this issue is far from over. More broadly, this latest self- inflicted fiasco demonstrates a worrying trait that has become more and more evident since Labour returned to power last summer. The new government has some big blind spots when it comes to reading the public mood. This complacency will be its undoing.
With the news that Labour will allow limited inquiries into the grooming gangs, Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman on the latest Coffee House Shots podcast:
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