Starmer to launch child grooming gangs inquiry

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UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will authorise a full statutory inquiry into the scale and extent of child sexual exploitation, after months of pressure on him to do so.

Starmer said on Saturday that he had accepted the need for an inquiry into grooming gangs on the recommendation of Baroness Louise Casey.

She has been carrying out an audit of the scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country, after scandals first emerged in the north of England in 2013.

“Her position when she started the audit was that there was not a real need for a national inquiry. She has looked at the material and she has come to the view that there should be a national inquiry on the basis of what she has seen,” Starmer said.

The scandals — in which gangs of men of predominantly Pakistani origin groomed and raped girls who were largely white — have already led to several inquiries.

The issue re-emerged earlier this year after Elon Musk posted on social media platform X about the issue and called for a national inquiry, a demand that was echoed by the opposition Conservative party and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

“I have never said we should not look again at any issue. I have wanted to be assured that on the question of any inquiry . . . that’s why I asked Louise Casey, whom I hugely respect, to do an audit,” Starmer told reporters while on a plane on the way to a meeting of the G7 group of leading nations in Canada on Saturday.

Starmer added that he had read “every word” of Casey’s report and that he was “going to accept her recommendation”.

“That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she has put in her audit,” Starmer said. “I asked her to do that job to double-check on this; she has done that job for me and having read her report, I respect her in any event. I shall now implement her recommendations.”

Starmer said the report would be “statutory under the Inquiries Act” but would take some time to set up “in an orderly way”.

Kemi Badenoch, Conservative party leader, said: “Keir Starmer doesn’t know what he thinks unless an official report has told him so. Just like he dismissed concerns about the winter fuel payment and then had to U-turn, just like he needed the Supreme Court to tell him what a woman is, he had to be led by the nose to make this correct decision here.”

Badenoch said the inquiry should be done “properly and quickly”.

Earlier this year home secretary Yvette Cooper announced government-backed local inquiries into grooming gangs, offering £5mn in funding for up to five locally led inquiries into historic cases, including one in Oldham. They are expected to follow the model of a judge-led inquiry that took place into grooming gangs in Telford.