First locations for grooming gang inquiry announced
The £65 million probe is investigating how grooming gangs operated and how police, councils, health services, social care services and schools responded
London, Oldham, Bradford and Keighley are to be the first towns and cities investigated by the grooming gangs inquiry.
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The £65 million probe is investigating how grooming gangs operated and how police, councils, health services, social care services and schools responded.
The announcement on Wednesday confirmed which areas will first face so-called local investigations – where serious failures have been identified in response to child sexual exploitation by grooming gangs.
Former children’s commissioner for England Baroness Anne Longfield is heading up the inquiry, which has the legal powers to compel witnesses to give evidence and require organisations to hand over documents.
Any evidence of crimes uncovered will be referred to Operation Beaconport, the national police operation launched last year to review hundreds of previously closed investigations.
Read more: Grooming gang criminals should not be eligible for early release, says Badenoch
Baroness Longfield said: "The inquiry's task is to find out why this catastrophic failure of the state happened and continues to happen, to establish why victims and survivors of abuse were failed, and to hold to account those institutions and individuals who failed them. Our national accountability hearings will begin before the end of the year.
"There have been many inquiries and reviews into grooming gangs and child sexual exploitation and abuse over the past 20 years, putting forward more than 800 recommendations, many of which have not been implemented.
"These hearings will help us to establish what national institutions and services should have been doing to implement these findings and to protect children from abuse and harm - and what, if any, progress has been made in areas where investigations have taken place.
"We are determined that our work ensures that no further inquiries into grooming gangs will ever be needed."
Concerns raised in Bradford and Keighley over many years have "formed an important part of the case for investigation".
The inquiry in London will look at how abuse by grooming gangs has been "identified and responded to," but the capital will pose a challenge due to the multiple boroughs.
Local investigations, which feed into the national picture, will explore what happened in each area, how children were targeted, individual and institutional responses, how victims were treated and what needs to change.
Robbie Moore, MP for Keighley, said: "This is a watershed moment and marks a significant turning point in the pursuit of justice, truth and accountability for victims and survivors right across our area. It comes almost two decades after Anne Cryer first had the courage to raise this issue in Parliament.
"Whilst no inquiry can undo the pain and suffering they have endured, it can help ensure the truth is uncovered and that those who were failed finally receive the answers they have spent years fighting for.
"One of the most difficult lessons of this entire process is that survivors have had to become campaigners themselves just to be heard.
"That should never have been necessary.
"It speaks to a deep and painful failure in Britain right now, and of the institutions at every level of the British state.
"Now we owe it to survivors, and to thousands across our area who suffered in silence, to see this through together.
"This inquiry must seek the truth - however horrific it may be. And bring about justice to those who have been failed for far too long."