UK announces national inquiry into ‘grooming gangs’ after pressure

The British government has announced it will hold a national inquiry into organised child sexual abuse after months of resisting the call from opposition groups.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Saturday that he had read “every single word” of an independent report into the sexual assault scandal, also known as the “grooming gangs” case, by Baroness Louise Casey and would accept her recommendation for the investigation.

“That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she [Casey] has put in her audit. I asked her to do that job to double check on this; she has done that job for me and having read her report … I shall now implement her recommendations.” Starmer told reporters travelling with him during a visit to Canada.

Earlier this year, the government dismissed calls for a public inquiry, stating that it was focusing on recommendations already made in a seven-year national inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay.

In 2022, Jay found that there had been institutional failings across the country, affecting tens of thousands of victims in England and Wales.

But the opposition Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, said Starmer only backs the report because “a report told him to”.

But increased interest into the “grooming gangs” case, as the British press termed it, was pushed by far-right groups, including Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, and further stoked by tech billionaire and Tesla owner Elon Musk, after the perpetrators of one of the most high-profile cases in the country were men of Pakistani heritage.

Their push was branded by critics as a racist dog whistle. The vast majority of “grooming gang” offences, however, are carried out by white men, the UK’s National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) said earlier this year.

Musk used his X platform to criticise the British prime minister over not backing a national inquiry after the local authority in Oldham, a town in northern England, found that girls under the age of 18 were sexually exploited by groups of men in the 2000s and 2010s.