Police cannot always record offender ethnicities, top cops say in response to Government

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood previously indicated she wants forces to record the information in the wake of the grooming gangs scandals.

But police chiefs have warned that forces are "never going to get to 100 per cent completion rate."

Speaking as new police data on child sexual abuse and exploitation was published on Thursday, Gareth Edwards, head of the Vulnerability Knowledge and Practice Programme, cast doubt on the move.

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He said: "Sometimes we won't know who the suspects are. Sometimes victims may not engage, there might be third-party reports.

"There are different reasons why we won’t always have that data available. But I think the ambition for us to improve our quality in that area is what we share collectively."

Police figures published on Thursday showed that of 122,768 child sexual abuse and exploitation offences recorded in 2024, self-defined ethnicity was recorded for 34 per cent or 38,015 of victims and 34 per cent, or 44,396 of perpetrators.

The majority of perpetrators were white British, making up 86.9 per cent of offenders, with the percentage of the UK population at 74.4 per cent in the 2021 census.

Specifically for group-based offending, crimes carried out by grooming gangs were 17 per cent of the total, with the majority committed within families, followed by child-on-child offences.

Pakistani perpetrators made up 3.94 per cent of offenders when 2.7 per cent of the UK population is this ethnicity, and white British made up 78.03 per cent of offenders compared to 74.4 per cent of the population.

Richard Fewkes, director of the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce, said that forces use self-defined ethnicity following recommendations put in place following the 1999 Macpherson report on the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Mr Fewkes said: "Police shouldn't guess, because by guessing, that is one of the things that actually contributes to institutional racism.

"So we either drop those principles and do something else, or we stick with them and accept you’re never, ever going to get 100 per cent of a suspect or indeed a victim’s self-defined ethnicity."

In June a report by Baroness Casey on grooming gangs found police should be made to gather data on the ethnicity and nationality of child abusers.

The Home Secretary appeared to go a step further this week, telling MPs that she wants ethnicity data to be collected for all offenders, to combat "conspiracy theories" around grooming gangs.