The chair of the grooming gangs inquiry has claimed that authorities felt “squeamish” addressing the ethnicity of the perpetrators.

Anne Longfield, a Labour peer who was appointed in December to lead the three-year Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs, said this afternoon that “there’s denial we keep coming back to, where people felt nervous, squeamish even, about tackling some of the issues around ethnicity.” She added, referring to the upcoming inquiry: “We’re not squeamish.”

Baroness Longfield was giving evidence to the Home Affairs Committee alongside the other two members of the inquiry’s panel, Zoë Billingham and Eleanor Kelly. “We understand completely not only the scale of this, but also the heinous nature of the crimes,” Longfield said. “We understand the extent of those injustices.”

She added that “individuals have suffered the most appalling experiences. There is a deficit of trust — quite rightly.” Referencing claims that British-Pakistani men involved in the gangs were allowed to get away with the abuse out of racial sensitivity among local and national authorities, Longfield insisted that “we recognise the important issue of ethnicity, and culture and religion.” She pointed to the audit published last year by Louise Casey into group-based child exploitation, which set out “the pitiful state of data” around the ethnic background of perpetrators. “Her audit was 34% of data in some cases,” Longfield said of Casey’s report. “Ten years ago, that would have been 3%.”

Billingham, who has previously served as a watchdog for police and fire services, said today:  “We know, in terms of prosecutions in some parts of the country, the perpetrators are from Asian-Pakistani heritage.” She added that “we’re not going to shy away from that. We’re not going to find excuses for that. In fact, quite the reverse: we’re going to be forensically looking at how religion and culture and heritage and background could or could not have been a driver.” According to Billingham, this applies both to “the appalling behaviours that we’ve seen” and “the way that victims were viewed and, most importantly for us, the way that agencies responded to what was evidently a clear and present danger”. The authorities, she claimed, “turned the other cheek”.

Longfield was previously Children’s Commissioner for England between 2015 and 2021, and has worked in policy and advocacy for young people for four decades. On her appointment at the end of last year, the inquiry chair stated that the process would “not flinch from uncomfortable truths”. Making clear that the remit of the inquiry would focus on organised grooming gangs rather than individual or familial sexual abuse, Longfield argued that “what has been minimised, explained away, or buried for far too long, is why the institutions that exist to protect [children] so often chose not to act.” The inquiry, which has a budget of £65 million, began last month and is expected to conclude in March 2029.

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is UnHerd’s Deputy Editor, Newsroom.

RobLownie

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