National grooming gangs inquiry stalls over remit wrangles and lack of chair

Exclusive (from the Guardian): Source says senior legal figures appear reluctant to head investigation launched by Keir Starmer in June

Keir Starmer’s national grooming gangs inquiry has stalled amid wrangles over its remit and difficulties in finding a senior legal figure willing to become its chair, the Guardian has been told.

Terms of the statutory investigation are still being discussed by a panel of stakeholders including survivors of abuse rings, four months after the prime minister bowed to pressure and set it up.

The search for a chair of the panel is still to be completed, the Home Office has confirmed. Judges and lawyers appear to be reluctant to head the inquiry, a source said.

Starmer previously resisted pressure for a new national inquiry into grooming gangs, and said earlier this year such a move would delay justice for victims and had already been examined in the seven-year independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA) led by Prof Alexis Jay.

But after a three-month audit by Dame Louise Casey, and pressure from survivors and Elon Musk, the government launched a national inquiry in June.

A dedicated panel of survivors and stakeholders has been set up to contribute to the selection of a chair and set the inquiry’s terms.

There have been disagreements on the panel over whether to include cases of child sexual exploitation and abuse committed by those other than street-based grooming gangs, sources said.  There have also been rows over suggestions to expand the inquiry to include other types of sexual abuse such as child sexual exploitation and abuse and widen the remit to examine sexual abuse across whole regions, it is understood.

A source said: “We could end up with another sprawling inquiry like IICSA’s seven-year investigation, which was too vague.”

Senior legal figures have turned down informal approaches about chairing the new inquiry – a sign that the government may be finding it hard to find a suitable candidate to cover a politically sensitive subject.

Grooming gangs remains a “toxic issue” because chairs will have to explore why men of Pakistani origin have dominated many of the abuse rings, a source said.

“It is difficult to find senior people willing to sacrifice several years of their life on a controversial inquiry if there is no assurance that any of it will be implemented properly. The problem with the IICSA grooming gangs investigation was that it was nothing like thorough enough, it was too superficial and took very little evidence from victims. So no one who is being tapped up as a possible chair of this inquiry will want to repeat that mistake,” he said.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The abuse of children by grooming gangs is one of the most horrific crimes imaginable. . . We are working urgently to appoint the best chair to take forward this work, to get to the truth and deliver justice to the survivors.”

Telegraph opinion this morning

Labour has a problem with rape gangs.

…Baroness Casey’s investigations into the matter when, earlier this year, she concluded that the authorities had shied away for too long from the ethnicity of the people involved in the systematic abuse of young white girls. As she put it, it is “not racist to examine the ethnicity of the offenders”. Lady Casey said she found evidence of “over-representation” of Asian and Pakistani heritage men among suspects in local data.

A panel set up by the Government, including victims of the gangs, has been unable even to agree what the remit of the inquiry should be, and no senior legal figure has been persuaded to chair it. This is not surprising: given the obvious reluctance of the Government to institute the inquiry, any senior judge or lawyer would be nervous about the level of political support they would receive during the inquiry, and in the crucial period afterwards when they might expect their recommendations to be implemented.

All of which presents a serious problem for Sir Keir and Jess Phillips, his safeguarding minister. . .they exposed themselves to suspicions that they were seeking to protect an important electoral demographic at the expense of the young white girls who were the gangs’ victims.

One of the sticking points reported to be causing delay is whether cases of child abuse beyond those carried out by the gangs should be in the inquiry’s remit. Ministers should resist this, for it would be accurately interpreted as an attempt to water down the purpose of the new inquiry: to ascertain the degree to which Pakistani men took part in the gangs’ crimes, and the extent to which local council officials, politicians and even police officers were complicit in hiding these crimes to preserve “inter-community relations”.

The second part of that remit must be a key part of any inquiry. It is vital to know not only the extent to which local officials were complicit in the rape, torture and exploitation of young girls considered to be “white trash” by so many who should have known better, but who those officials were.

The suspicion that Labour ministers are more concerned about losing their Muslim voter base than they are about delivering justice to the rape gangs’ victims must be addressed seriously by the likes of Ms Phillips, and not dismissed out of hand as some kind of outrageous calumny. The nation is watching and ministers must act.