EXCLUSIVE: The Daily Express has uncovered shocking evidence of grooming gangs scandal in London
Sadiq Khan has been accused of covering up evidence of grooming gangs in London after an Express investigation. The Mayor of London read reports of young girls being raped in hotels by groups of men while publicly denying there were any grooming gangs in the capital.
The children were also plied with drugs and had their lives threatened, evidence uncovered by the Express and MyLondon shows.
Grooming gang whistleblower Maggie Oliver told the Express that the cases followed “the same pattern” she had seen with Greater Manchester Police’s cover-up of the Rochdale scandal. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp MP, accused Khan of being part of a “cover-up” and called for accountability.
Reform UK MP Lee Anderson also said the mayor had “serious questions to answer.” He said: “There is real, credible evidence that grooming gangs exist in London, and for the Mayor to have potentially turned a blind eye is utterly shameful”.
The mayor and the Metropolitan Police have consistently claimed to have “no reports” of Rochdale or Rotherham-style rape gangs in the capital, with Khan suggesting there was “no indication” they exist. However, in the pages of four different His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services reports from 2016-2025, which the Mayor of London personally responded to, we found details of six potential victims.
When these case studies were assessed by Rochdale whistleblower detective Maggie Oliver and care professional and author Chris Wild, they found “red flags” of grooming gang abuse. Oliver told us she was certain three victims could be described as victims of a grooming gang.
Oliver said she wasn’t surprised that examples of grooming gangs were hiding in plain sight having faced a lengthy battle to get justice for the victims of similar groups in Rochdale. . .
“I think the Met is the last bastion of being able to cover up, because I have no doubt from the work we do [at the Maggie Oliver Foundation charity supporting survivors and] from what I’ve read [in the investigation’s findings] that there is a similar pattern of abuse in [London]. I don’t know how they’ve managed to cover it up for so long, but it doesn’t surprise me.”
The public record evidence of London’s grooming gangs is not confined to the regular inspection reports of the Met police. The Express/MyLondon investigation found more victim case studies from Tower Hamlets, east London in the evidence presented to the last grooming gangs inquiry.
It’s a matter of public record that the inquiry identified five different children in the east London borough as suffering abuse at the hands of sexual exploitation networks. During the hearings, witness statements described “groups of older men” sexually exploiting girls in hotel rooms in the late 2010s.
But a detail unreported at the time was that both the local council and Metropolitan Police, who denied the existence of sex abuse gangs in the area, were using a different definition to the inquiry that was based on an “organised crime network,” rather than a grooming gang.
When approached for comment a spokesperson for the Mayor of London provided a single overarching statement that said: “The Mayor has always been clear that the safety of Londoners is his top priority and nowhere is this truer than in safeguarding children.
Update from My London
It always seemed an absurd stance to take. In a capital city home to 13 per cent of the UK’s population: There are “no reports and no indication” of grooming gangs, according to the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. We have “not seen” them, claimed the Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley.
Despite a barrage of questions from Assembly Members over the last year – Do we have grooming gangs in London? Do we have rape gangs in London? Do we have child sexual exploitation gangs in London? – the line stayed the same: “Not here guv”.
But that abruptly changed in City Hall last week, 24 hours after the force responded to a MyLondon/Express investigation by admitting group-based child sexual exploitation in London is “more varied than other parts of the country”.
Fielding an off-topic question from a Labour assembly member on Thursday (October 16), Sir Mark revealed the Met actually has a “steady flow” and “several live current investigations”, with a “very significant” number of historic case reviews that will cost “millions of pounds a year, for several years” to re-investigate.
Proof alone, the Met and the Mayor of London’s public position on grooming gangs in the capital was wrong and police knew.
I think I know why, though.
When it comes to grooming gangs, there is no escaping Asian and Pakistani offenders have been the mainstay of media coverage.
But London was always going to be different.
“The victims are as diverse as the perpetrators,” an expert told me early on in my investigation, an insight that has matched up with our research so far.
This is the video of Mark Rowley admitting the problem and the investigations. I can’t embed it so follow the link.
As I have been saying for years there is not the handy pool of underprivileged white girls on a nearby housing estate on which the kebab merchants and taxi drivers can prey at scale. The whole area of Greater London is barely half white British now, and we are concentrated in what some call the doughnut, the outer ring. In inner London, Hackney where I was born is 36% white British, Waltham Forest where I grew up 35%, Barking and Dagenham where I set up my first home 31%. Tower Hamlets where my family originate 24%, Redbridge where I used to work, 24% and Newham where I had friends 15%. I have long suspected that many victims in London will prove to be mixed race. The Sikhs and Hindus have form for protecting their daughters, the black community brook no interference from outside. What Maggie Oliver calls the ‘text-book’ grooming MO has been taken up by copycat gangs; this crew of Romanians and Albanians were convicted in Gateshead only last week.
So expect London to be different, but not in a good way.
