Labour U-turn as court archive now told to STOP deleting vital data used to track grooming gangs

The MoJ has said it would not scrub its own internal archives, but its information is held in a far less structured way.

Conservative MP Katie Lam said its deletion would sabotage the upcoming national inquiry into grooming gangs.

She told The People’s Channel: “The national inquiry, which hasn’t yet begun, although the draft terms of reference have been published, will be looking at grooming and rape gangs across the country. It should be examining patterns of behaviour, patterns of abuse, and different types of cases including cases that we might not even realise are connected until we look at them together.”

CEO Mr Leahy said he does not believe the deletion was an active attempt to cover-up grooming gangs.  I do.

Somebody panicked, then another, wiser, official saw this from the Telegraph yesterday, and pressure from the shadow Secretary of State for Justice and Shadow Home Secretary. She realised the way the wind is blowing, and decided she wasn’t going to be the scapegoat.

Over thirty years ago I had a row with the bossy super-tidy young women who ran our office registry that they were taking files from my section ‘for archiving’ too soon and then destroying them (or sending them away to central archive office to be lost forever, which had the same effect) too soon. At that time we had no thought of a nationwide rape gang cover-up and that was not the area I was working.  I was thinking like a historian not a minimalist. But I stand by that opinion.

Courtsdesk on X yesterday hours before deletion was expected to take place. 

This is Endas Substack,  setting out originally why courtsdesk were sadly having to comply with the order, and now how that order has been postponed pending new discussion with MoJ. 

we have received a letter from the Government Legal Department acting on behalf of HMCTS, dated today, 18 February 2026. The letter requests that we hold off on deleting our archive while the government considers our representations and clarifies matters previously discussed, and invites us to engage in formal dialogue about applying for a new licensing arrangement.

HMCTS have issued a “market engagement notice”, which we warmly welcome. More importantly we are simply grateful for a chance to resolve a problem, and a deletion request, which we hoped could be resolved, with dialogue and cooperation.

Without a huge edit, and given the time pressure, I want to retract the statements made in this post regarding our intention to proceed with deletion tomorrow. But we are leaving the post here to avoid misinterpretation or conspiracy theories about the change in position.

The government are right to be cautious and careful about how this data is handled and we are determined to show that it has never been put at risk by us.

We are responding to the letter from HMCTS with the utmost urgency and in a spirit of full cooperation. We are genuinely hopeful that this marks the beginning of a constructive and lasting re-engagement.