Casey wants ‘national reset’ on grooming gangs

Dame Louise Casey has called for a newly-announced inquiry into grooming gangs to be used as a “moment to have a national reset” on the issue.

The crossbench peer’s report into the nature and scale of group-based child sexual abuse in England and Wales paved the way for a new national inquiry announced at the weekend by Sir Keir Starmer.

Baroness Casey urged those called to give evidence to the inquiry to be open to scrutiny and change.

She told the Commons home affairs committee she wanted the government to “crack on” with the inquiry, suggesting it could be completed within three years, with regular updates before the final report.

She was also quizzed by MPs about her report’s finding that the ethnicity of people involved in grooming gangs had been “shied away from” by the authorities.

The peer urged people to “keep calm” on the subject of ethnicity.

Pointing out that her report had said data on the ethnicity of perpetrators was “incomplete and unreliable”, she said: “If you look at the data on child sexual exploitation, suspects and offenders, it’s disproportionately Asian heritage.

“If you look at the data for child abuse, it is not disproportionate, and it is white men.

“So again, just [a] note to everybody really, outside here rather than in here, let’s just keep calm here about how you interrogate data and what you draw from it.”

Baroness Casey said she did not think it was “unreasonable” to hold the government to account in six months’ time on whether her 12 recommendations have been implemented.

“I hope this is a line in the sand, and I think the 12 things that we’re asking for are not impossible.

“They’re not pipe dreams, they’re achievable.”

She also told the committee she would like to see “quite a significant uplift in the prosecutions, the action, the criminal investigations on child sexual exploitation, both historic and current”.