Yvette Cooper has said the government is pressing ahead with local grooming gang inquiries, as Labour MPs warned the right was “weaponising” claims that the party watered down its promise to hold them in five areas.
The home secretary moved to defuse a row over the politically explosive issue, after the Conservatives and Reform UK claimed the government had dropped its commitment made in January.
Cooper said there had been “party political misinformation”, after the Home Office minister Jess Phillips told the House of Commons this week there would be a “flexible approach to support full independent local inquiries and more bespoke work, including local victims’ panels or locally led audits of the handling of historical cases”.
Her comments to MPs were interpreted by opponents as Labour rowing back on its commitment to the local inquiries, with claims it is doing so in order to avoid offending Muslim voters.
Labour MPs said they had been deluged with criticism from the public, after opposition parties condemned the government, and Trevor Phillips, a former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, described it as “utterly, utterly shameful”.
Jess Phillips moved to reassure MPs with a briefing on Wednesday and was expected to speak to more colleagues on Thursday. The government rejected the claims of watering down and suggested that more than five inquiries could be held.
One Labour MP said the government needed to find ways to “deal with the right weaponising” the issue as the current situation was untenable. Another Labour MP said the initial lack of concrete commitment to five local inquiries had fuelled confusion and said it had given rise to an unnecessary political attack from the party’s opponents, if there really was no watering down.
The government has resisted calls for another national inquiry into grooming gangs, after a previous independent inquiry into child sexual abuse by Prof Alexis Jay identified “institutional failings”. In January, Cooper promised £5m for local investigations in five areas, including Oldham. The other areas have not yet been named.
Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, said on Thursday he expected a judicial review to be launched on Monday into the government’s decision not to hold another national inquiry into child sexual exploitation and abuse in towns.
Trevor Phillips, who is now a Sky News presenter, told Times Radio that the government’s move was “obviously political”.
“People in government who are responsible for this, who are in other ways completely decent people, should really be ashamed of themselves, because it’s so obvious that they’re not doing this because of the demographic of the people involved, as Katie Lam, the Tory MP, said yesterday, largely Pakistani Muslim in background, and also in Labour-held seats and councils who would be offended by it,” he said.
However, Cooper called Phillips’ comments “total nonsense”. She said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “There hasn’t been a change. There’s a lot of misinformation about this and, sadly, a lot of party political misinformation about this. So let’s be clear what we’re doing: we’re increasing the action on child sexual exploitation and child sexual abuse.
“These are some of the most vile crimes in terms of the exploitation you’ve got; grooming gangs, rape, coercion, exploitation, some horrendous crimes – these were obviously covered as part of the national statutory inquiry, the seven-year inquiry that took place, but we’re also supporting local inquiries.”
She added: “We’ve already said we’ll support Oldham to have a local inquiry, and we’re currently drawing up the framework for further local inquiries. We always said from the start we would also support areas that wanted to set up victim panels, but we’re continuing to support the local inquiries, too, just as we said earlier this year.”
Making clear the government’s position, Cooper said: “Not only are we continuing with the plans for local inquiries, as we set out in January, that has not changed, we’re also saying we will support areas that want to do more to work with victims and survivors. That has not changed, that is what we set out in January.
“Most crucially of all, we’re supporting increased police investigations into these vile crimes, we have got increased investigations taking place, we have asked the police to review previous cases where no further action had been taken, and we are giving victims and survivors stronger rights to be able to ask for their cases to be reviewed and to be reopened.”
Cooper said these police investigations were “the most important thing of all”. She said: “If you want to get justice for survivors and for victims of child sexual exploitation and abuse, we need the police investigations, and we need to get perpetrators behind bars.”
