Home secretary Yvette Cooper (copyright: House of Commons)
Loading …Home secretary Yvette Cooper has ordered a national audit of gang-related child sexual exploitation (CSE), to examine the current scale and nature of the problem.
Alongside the three-month review, led by Baroness (Louise) Casey, the government will support – and fund – councils to carry out local inquiries into gang-based abuse, initially in five areas, Cooper told the House of Commons today.
The announcements are ministers’ latest moves to address the furore over gang-related CSE that has blown up in recent weeks.
Elon Musk’s interventions
That followed news that safeguarding minister Jess Phillips had rejected a request from Oldham Council to set up a public inquiry into CSE in the borough, instead advising it commission its own local review.
The revelation triggered a series of posts on X by its owner, Elon Musk, which were highly critical of Phillips and prime minister Keir Starmer. Meanwhile, the Conservatives called for a national public inquiry into gang-based CSE, with a focus on crimes committed by men of Pakistani heritage.
This was despite the issue having been covered by the seven-year Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which reported in 2022, as well as by various local inquiries, for example, in Rotherham and Telford.
Mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse
Cooper responded, initially, with a statement to Parliament last week, in which she pledged to implement some of IICSA’s recommendations, including the introduction of mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse (CSA) by those in positions of trust over children.
She also said that Tom Crowther KC, who led the inquiry into CSE in Telford, would work with the government and councils where “more formal inquiries are required to tackle persistent problems”.
Today, she said Crowther would work with the government to “develop a new framework for victim-centred, locally led inquiries”, which would be piloted in Oldham and four other areas, backed by £5m of government funding.
Alongside this, Casey’s review would audit both police intelligence and child protection referrals, examine the demographics of gangs and victims, look at the cultural drivers of group-based CSE and make recommendations about further actions to address “current and historical failures”.
No public inquiry into CSE
Cooper’s announcement will be seen as a concession to the government’s critics. However, neither Casey’s audit nor the local reviews are public inquiries, with the power to compel witnesses to give evidence, as called for by the Conservatives and others.
On this point, shadow home secretary Chris Philp questioned how they could “possibly get to the truth when faced with cover-ups”.
Cooper said the government would work with councils “to bolster the accountability mechanisms that can support and follow up local inquiries, to ensure that those who are complicit in cover-ups, or who try to resist scrutiny, are always robustly held to account so that truth and justice are never denied”.
Inquiry implementation plan to come
In her previous statement, Cooper said the government would implement some of the recommendations from IICSA’s final report and its separate report into child sexual exploitation by organised networks, including:
- Mandatory reporting of CSA, which was recommended in the final report.
- Creating a new performance framework, with data collection requirements, for the police concerning CSA and CSE. This responds to IICSA’s recommendation, from its final report, to introduce a core data set for the issue, to tackle what it found was a lack of reliable data, particularly in relation to CSE.
- Legislating to make grooming an aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sexual offences, a recommendation from recommendation from IICSA’s report on CSE by organised networks.
In her latest statement, the home secretary said the government would publish a plan for taking forward the 20 recommendations from IICSA’s final report before Easter, though did not commit to implementing all of them.
She said the government had accepted in full four recommendations that were directed at the Home Office and had started implementing them. Besides mandatory reporting, these include improving compliance by relevant organisations with their duty to refer concerns about people’s suitability to work with children to the Disclosure and Barring Service procedures.
Recommendations from report on CSE by organised groups
Cooper added that the government would also implement all remaining recommendations from IICSA’s report on CSE by organised networks beyond making grooming an aggravating factor in sentencing.
Of the other five recommendations, one – updating the Home Office’s child exploitation disruption toolkit to improve guidance to practitioners on tackling CSE – appears to have been met.
Another concerns improving police and local authority collection of CSE data, including by separating it from data on other forms of abuse, such as CSA, and collecting information on the sex, ethnicity and disability of both the victim and perpetrator. This will likely be covered by the plan to create a new performance framework for the police in relation to CSA and CSE.
Call for ban on unregulated placements
IICSA also called for a ban on the use of unregulated placements in independent or semi-independent accommodation for 16 and 17-year-olds in care who have experienced, or are at heightened risk of, CSE, in the light of the risks many have faced in those settings.
The recommendation came after the government had banned unregulated placements for under-16s, but before it ended the legal use of unregulated provision for looked-after children, by requiring organisations to register as supported accommodation providers and comply with regulations.
These include ensuring that staff “have the skills to identify and act upon signs that a child is at risk of abuse, neglect, exploitation or any other harm, and act to reduce such risk” and can “support children to maintain appropriate and safe relationships with family, friends and other people who are important to them”.
It is likely this recommendation will be interpreted as met by the government, despite longstanding criticisms from campaigners that the supported accommodation regime is insufficiently protective of children and young people.
CSE guidance to be revised
That leaves two recommendations, both of which concern the Department for Education updating its 2017 guidance for practitioners and leaders on protecting children on CSE.
This should include providing further advice on online exploitation and abuse by organised networks and making clear that, where there are signs that a child is being exploited, they should not be treated as merely being “at risk” of CSE, IICSA said.
The inquiry found “a distinctive professional language around child sexual exploitation has developed over many years, which describes children being ‘at risk’ despite clear evidence of actual harm having occurred”.
As a result, children who had, for example, contracted sexually transmitted infections or were regularly going missing with adults, were not being given the support they needed because they were not treated as having experienced CSE.
In her statement, Cooper told the House of Commons that the DfE guidance would be updated, in response to IICSA’s recommendations.
