The national grooming gangs inquiry, established after Louise Casey’s report last year into the scandal, has chosen an intriguing place to begin its work: London.

Oldham is also in the initial tranche of locations, unsurprisingly given that the North West of England is seen as the “ground zero” of grooming gangs featuring men from predominantly Pakistani backgrounds. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has welcomed the inquiry, despite previously shrugging off accusations of such gangs operating in the capital. He argued that London’s problems with sex offenders, due to its demographics compared to the rest of the UK, are more nuanced. Nonetheless, the Met was ordered to reassess cases dating back to 2010, subsequently discovering 4,000 grooming offenses. For the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police, reinvestigating these cases will prove uncomfortable. Which skeletons, this time, are likely to fall out of New Scotland Yard’s well-stocked closet?

First, though, it should be acknowledged that Khan has a point concerning his fiefdom’s demographics. Offenses featuring a single cultural group, as occurred in places such as Bradford and Oldham, are unlikely to be replicated in London. The capital’s racial diversity is such that a wide spectrum of offending patterns will be revealed. Some of these are likely to make uncomfortable reading for politicians and criminal-justice elites. In 2024, for example, up to 47% of sexual offenses charged in the capital were committed by Foreign National Offenders (FNOs). This is doubly concerning when London’s population of foreign nationals is over 23%.

During my service in the Met, I saw intelligence concerning trafficking and grooming offenses involving any number of ethnic and national groups, including Moroccans, Slovakians, Poles, Indians and, of course, “indigenous” white Britons. After all, no single culture has a monopoly on sexual offending. Nonetheless, a cynic might wonder if this is a reason why London was chosen in the inquiry’s opening tranche — to dilute the sensitive Mirpuri-Pakistani aspect of the grooming scandal. Conversely, Khan might point to the lack of comparisons to Oldham, but what creepy crawlies will the review discover as it begins turning over London stones?

The second issue concerns the Metropolitan Police, as the force’s failures in investigating sexual offenses are long-established. Back in the early 2000s, faced with concerns around the efficacy of rape investigations, the Met created Operation Sapphire. A specialist unit, Sapphire, worked in tandem with the force’s Child Abuse Investigation Teams to investigate allegations of rape and serious sexual abuse. In 2018, following another round of swingeing cuts, the Met closed Sapphire as part of a disastrous force restructuring program, returning rape investigation to already hard-pressed local CID units.

The force’s lack of competence around investigating sexual offenses was soon under question, with fresh concerns around training, supervision and professional conduct. Workloads were scandalously high, and the CID was increasingly seen as a punishment posting. Officers also cite the recruitment of “direct-entry” detectives as an issue. These officers were often young graduates with no uniform experience. Thrown into the deep end, many promptly sank.

As is often the case with British policing, scandals prompt reviews. These, in turn, involve exercises reinventing the wheel. In 2021 one such development was Operation Soteria, a new initiative to “transform the investigation of rape”. Bringing with it a new series of acronyms such as RASSO (Rape and Serious Sexual Offenses) and VAWG (Violence Against Women and Girls), Soteria features panels, consultative groups, and accredited professional practices designed to improve police conviction rates. There have been modest successes, but is Soteria another example of corporate sticking plasters proving more politically and economically palatable than investing in mainstream police capability?

These are the issues investigators will discover as they delve into old case files in the capital. There are few secrets as to the identities or modus operandi of offenders, nor are there many around police weaknesses. What might be discovered, though, is the extent of corporate indifference to everyday policing and its impact on children suffering sexual abuse — London’s most vulnerable victims.