Welcome to this one-off session of the Home Affairs Committee. Baroness Casey, we are very grateful that you have come in front of the Committee. We have your report. It is extensive and has given us lots of good reading overnight. We are very keen to hear from you about your findings and the work you did. It might be useful if you and your team could introduce yourselves, and then Baroness Casey, if you could make an opening statement, that would be helpful.

I am Louise Casey. I led the piece of work—the audit—that I am before you today to account for.

I am Neil O’Connor. I have also been supporting the audit.

My name is Sarah Kincaid, and I, too, have been working on the audit.

Just to add a moment of levity, you are looking at Ocean’s 23. The people to my left and my right have worked with me on and off for quite a long time. In putting together what was quite a tough brief, I reached out and got these people—including some of those behind me—back to help do it, for which I am extremely grateful. The report is now in the public domain, and I am really grateful for the ability to come here so soon, before appearing anywhere else, apart from the media yesterday. This probably concludes where I am for now in terms of any public discourse. Some of you in the room will know that just over a decade ago, I published the inspection into Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, including with people who are sat behind me and next to me right now. I was therefore somewhat surprised when the Prime Minister and his team called me in January, amidst the noise and haste, and asked me to re-engage in this area and conduct an audit. I think that was absolutely the right thing to do. There was a lot of noise and haste, conjecture and accusations. What was needed, and therefore I was happy to do it—and I am happy that I have done it, as challenging a project as it was—was to establish what the actual facts were in as calm and measured a way as possible. It has not been a straightforward undertaking, and obviously, we had a pretty challenging timeline. Dame Karen, we have worked in different spheres for a number of years, and I think many of you around the table will understand this. It is hard to imagine that things had not improved as much as I hoped they would have in that decade. It is pretty tough to see that we have not—and by “we”, I mean all of us—made as much progress as we could have. On an entirely personal level, I have thought in the last few months, should I have done more since leaving Rotherham? Should I have kept more of an eye on this? Did I just take at face value some of the things that were going on? I can easily say to yourselves today and to victims that I was doing other things, but I think it is okay to ask oneself, where were you, and did I do a good enough job, knowing what we found in Rotherham? That is why I have been saying, when I have had the chance to do so in the last 24 hours, that I think we have to attempt to put children in particular at the heart of any discourse going forward. I would be very surprised if any public servant in the land would not agree with the findings and what I am trying to do. Let me set the context, and I am very conscious that this is the Home Affairs Committee, so I am not appearing in front of people who do not know some things, and if I am teaching a grandmother to suck eggs, forgive me—I am sure you know a great deal about these subjects, as others do not. But it is important to say that what is called group-based child sexual exploitation, which is quite a mouthful, is, thankfully, still rare. It may be at the most heinous end of crimes, but we have to get a sense of the proportionality and where it fits in the 100,000 crimes of child abuse that have been reported in the last 12 months. I am fairly sure that it is still happening today. We can explain that later, if necessary. People do not necessarily look hard enough to find these children, in particular. The world of crime is quite complicated. To quote colleagues in the police, they are awash with online harm and online exploitation. We have had the growth in the visibility of county lines and child criminal exploitation, and at the same time, I do not think child abuse or child sexual exploitation has gone away. Certainly, from the evidence we saw during the audit and the visits we undertook to some police forces, it is clear that it is still happening. I am conscious that there are more legally qualified people sat round the table than myself, but I have gone quite hard on the fact that I think we really have to get a grip of how we treat children. This, again, dates back to Rotherham, where I listened to the testimony of a young woman—she was a child at the time—who was multiple raped by multiple men on multiple occasions as a 13th birthday present, in the knowledge that, her perpetrator said, it would not be seen as rape, which she believed. I have always thought, why do we have this difference from 12 to 13? I am sure there are myriad good reasons why we historically did, but I think it is time to draw a line under that and see children as children. If we did that, that would have more profound implications across society anyway. There are lots of people out there worrying about lots of other things to do with adolescents and teenagers, and this would just be one very clear, historic law change. Given that we have not looked at rape law since 2003, I think the time is right to do that, and it would be a very fitting outcome to the audit. The other thing I want to put in some context is that I am calling for—and they have agreed to—a national police operation. The big thing I want to happen is a national criminal operation. I suggested, and they have agreed, that it is led by the National Crime Agency. That is in part because Operation Stovewood, which is the NCA, were brought into South Yorkshire Police in 2014, after Alexis Jay’s report, not mine. I was there when Stovewood arrived, and I can see over their years of doing good police work that they have built up a very high level of expertise, which other forces could benefit from, and it would also give confidence to victims. That is my big ask, I suppose; there is an irony there. What I envisaged as the second part of that was an independent commission that would grasp the two. You would have a police criminal investigation, and then I have asked for—and they have agreed to do—a national inquiry, where I want very strong footprints locally. I want it to be a different type of inquiry from things that have happened before, and I see a link between those two; they should feed into each other. The national data on grooming gangs—I am not often accused of being a civil servant—is “incomplete and unreliable”; that is what is written here. That is putting it mildly. I feel very strongly on issues that are as searing as people’s race, when we know the prejudice and racism that people of colour experience in this country, that to not get how you treat that data right is a different level of public irresponsibility. I am sorry to put it so bluntly—I did not put it that bluntly yesterday. It is particularly important, if you are collecting those sorts of issues, to get them 100% right. If you are not getting them 100% right, please don’t use them to justify another position, which is potentially what happened. That may be well meaning, or it may not, but that is how the data has run, and I think the sooner we bring a close to that—my view is either collect something or don’t collect something. For God’s sake, don’t half-collect it—that is a bloody disaster, frankly. I think this is now a matter of public record. We dug deeper into three police force areas where there is a clear higher rate of child sexual exploitation offending. We dug deeper into those to see whether they had established the facts and figures, and they had done so much more than the national data. That then meant that I was somewhat tougher, actually—in the way that I have just talked about—with the national data, because if I know that it can be collected in large police forces effectively, why can I not collect that nationally? Do you see? It added to the sense of, “Oh, dear God, what on earth have you done here?” If you look at those three large police forces and their data—one is historic, to be fair, but the other two are live—the disproportionality issue is clear. Obviously, when they ask for ethnicity, largely, one stops at Asian and the other stops at Pakistani heritage. Again, I can only feel the pain of those communities to know that it is all bundled together in one big grouping, and how unhelpful that is to the very communities that you are talking about. I think that is not a great way for public policy to be done. I went into other less scientific ways of trying to see what was going on with serious case reviews, which we can come to—what is happening in the world of serious case reviews and children’s data could be a subject or topic for your fellow Committee all on its own. We went there and examined that. As a note of caution, when we asked the good people of Greater Manchester Police to help us look at the data—I think this is in the report—we also collected what was happening with child abuse more generally. If you look at the data on child sexual exploitation suspects and offenders, it is disproportionately people of Asian heritage. If you look at the data for child abuse, it is not disproportionate, and it is white men. Again, just a note to everybody outside here—rather than in here—let’s keep calm about how you interrogate data and what you draw from it. I think I have said that there is some poor recording in the criminal justice system, but not just in the criminal justice system. We have strong views, which you have seen in the audit, about children’s services in local authorities and this extraordinary change. You are Home Affairs, so you have crime recording of child abuse here going up. If you look over at colleagues in children’s services in local government, you will certainly see that children on child protection plans for sexual abuse is at an all-time low in the last 30 years. We thought, “Why are we the first people to open that cupboard and have a look at it?” That tells you something; if you were trying to sort this out, you might have a different view of it. I often think that the Department of Health gets a hospital pass—pun intended, just to bring a note of levity into a serious session. Honest to God, the absence of national data from the Department of Health world is woeful. The one thing you will know, as Home Affairs colleagues, is that quite often victims are actually all in the Health world. Sometimes, the Health world gets those people to our world so we can prosecute the people who are harming them. It really is an important issue that this is not just something for the Home Office or the Ministry of Justice; there is a responsibility on the Department of Health, on the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and very much on the Department for Education not to see this as something down in a bit of 2 Marsham Street. I am worried about that because we have talked about it relentlessly. I do not think this is the first Select Committee or Public Accounts Committee that I have been before asking for better sharing of data between services and agencies. I think I put in one of the recommendations that we need to look at how we make that mandatory, and therefore if something is not mandatory or if people do not do it, what consequences they are going to face this time around. It strikes me that it is not done. Again, I am sure you know this possibly more than I did. Until I went back in to do this audit, I did not realise the paucity of technology to support the police in what they are doing. I was there when the tragedy of Soham happened. We knew at that point that if we had had better data sharing, there was a possibility that we might have saved those girls’ lives. There is certainly an absolute clarity that intelligence would have been much faster to the order of either avoiding it or actually finding that dreadful human being earlier. We have known that forever onwards. There is also an issue that I feel the Home Office cannot drag their feet on. Sorry, that is a tough thing to say, but they should not drag their feet on looking at police intelligence systems, given that we are living in the 21st century and that, probably, everybody in this room can connect within seconds. Yet we had Bedfordshire Police rightly finding a young boy, as it happened, who was being, in my mind, trafficked to London, but the data intelligence system did not make it easy for them to find that he was in Deptford and being circled and dealt with by predators. I found that hard to understand. I realise it is not a massive issue for the public necessarily, but it is a very big issue for the system. The last thing I wanted to say, if I may, Dame Karen, is that, sadly, none of the issues in the audit are new. I felt that other colleagues possibly could have found that if they had looked harder before us. We didn’t do anything particularly clever. We just put together the facts as best we could and presented them with as straight a bat as possible. That always causes me a bit of concern. I like to think I am clever sometimes and I can find something new, but most of the time, as I head into 40 years in public service, you find the same thing, and what you have to do is be brave about dealing with it. I suppose this is the last thing I want to say—the tone we need to set is that we need a national reset when it comes to children and child abuse, and, within child abuse, child sexual exploitation. That is why I have put together a package of recommendations that include consent through to sorting out taxis, with a national criminal investigation and a national inquiry sandwiched between the two. I hope that is a helpful start.

Thank you very much. That helps to set the scene for us and our questioning. I read your report and felt rather unwell as to just how much was familiar and had not been joined up. That is a great frustration for all of us who serve in public life. We are cross party, but we are a team working together to try to establish how we can help scrutinise the Government and the work of the Home Office. With that in mind, colleagues are acutely aware that this is a very serious issue and we do not need to start having tribal party politics involved in it. I will start the questioning with Jake Richards.

If you want machinations of what blocks of evidence we put together and how, I might ask my colleagues to help with that. I would direct you, Mr Richards, to a very long timeline, which is in the beginning, and shows the amount of times post 2009—the first Government statutory definition of child sexual exploitation was in 2009. We did not sweep through, but carefully went through, all the different instances. It is not complete; there is more there. I have had some people since say, “I did a documentary then, why wasn’t that included yesterday?” I am sure we could go on and on with it. We did a very big look. It is always the same; you look at who has gone before you, why things did not change, what stopped them from changing if you can, and piece together whether it was something that all just needed putting together. Once you put it together people go, “Oh good God, we all should have known.” The data speaks for itself. It is almost impossible to get through; I feel sorry for anybody trying to read the report. We went through it chapter by chapter on nature and scale definitions; we literally went through and looked at all the definitions. We spared you the multiple appendices we could have attached to it to show just how many times people have looked at definitions and strategies. But we have not got to the nub of it, and that is partly the problem. We did a lot of homework. Does that answer the question, or not quite?

Victims and survivors are really angry that things have not changed sufficiently. I do not think the children that are there now feel confident in what is going on at the moment, and I think a lot of them are still carrying some of the open criminal investigations that have gone on for years without any sense of closure. Remember the backdrop here is that when children are small, we, as a society and a state, have eyes on them. That is a really important thing; it is not just about crime, but more general. When kids are born into the world, normally they are born in a hospital, so we see the parents. Then there are health visitors, so we continue to support and see the parents. Then they go to schools and nurseries where the class sizes are small, and they have one teacher who can do pastoral care. At age 11, quite rightly, they move to larger schools where they are in a much bigger situation because they have to grow and be independent. That is all about not treating them as children until they are suddenly 18. But for the state, it means our safety net changes. I think we overall do not see the fact that as they get older—where they are in our care as opposed to their parental care, which has failed—we ought to double down on the people around them who are the predators who come after them. They feel guilt as survivors, about being called “wayward”, knowing that nobody cared about them or the fact that their parents were not watching a 24-hour “find a friend” to see where they were and what pub they were in—

Some of them have criminal convictions, because we decided that because a girl was told by said bloke to bring her friend, then we do her for child abuse offences. I went beyond the terms of reference of the audit because I felt, partly because of Rotherham, that we owed it to both look at what the victims were saying and doing, and to meet some of them. We did some meetings with victims.

We are obviously happy to do that. I think we have got to be careful—I have got to be careful—not to overstep my position in terms of respecting the process that now happens. It is the Safeguarding Minister—I am sure you know her well—who leads for victims, and I would not want to get in the way of those things, but I am not going to walk away from this issue for the rest of my career.

Very much so, yes. It is not like anybody publicly asked me my view. I was not on the record somehow giving media interviews. I was busy worrying about social care post-Christmas. I had other things on my mind. That said, when we were in a discussion about it really early on—I said this to Downing Street—I think I would have said to anybody who asked me, “Do we really need another national inquiry?” Alexis Jay did a seven-year inquiry. It was pretty thorough. I followed Alexis into Rotherham all those years ago. She is a pretty thorough lady. I was of the view—because I have also written reports that have not been implemented—that perhaps we ought to implement the recommendations of her report before we start thinking about anything else. I was definitely there, and I own that. During the course of the review, it became abundantly clear on a number of fronts that if we did not have a national inquiry as opposed to just a series of local inquiries, then we would not get to the issue of accountability. Those of you who have got some knowledge of me around the table will know that I like finding criminals and I like locking them up for a very long time and if I was going to spend money on anything, I would spend money on more prison places and more police officers. I am pretty tough on crime, so at some level I was thinking, “If I am going to ask the public to spend money on anything—do you know what?—I think I will go and get some more criminals.” That was very much my position. During the course of the audit, a few things came to light very, very clearly. First of all, when they made an announcement in January that they had at least the money for five areas to do local inquiries and that everybody would somehow come forward and decide to do these inquiries, only Oldham bit the bullet—that is how I would describe it—and said, “Yes, we want to do a local inquiry.” My understanding is that nobody else volunteered for that. That tells you something, doesn’t it? That tells you something, and it does not tell you something that I would want to hear if I was a victim. Then we head into looking at some of these reviews. A number of comments were made. The most important one at this point in the chronology was Andy Burnham’s asking for a national inquiry, which I could not understand. In among everything else, we looked at his assurance reviews. Andy Burnham, quite rightly in my view, did a bit of what I am doing. He thought, “This stuff is going on in Greater Manchester. I need to be assured.” He called them assurance reviews—“What’s going on in Rochdale? What’s going on in Oldham? I need to see what the police are doing.” He had victims and Maggie Oliver in a big meeting—it wasn’t in the town hall but whatever his place is in Manchester. They all agreed that people had to be held to account, that we had to find out the truth and that we had to find out whether decisions were made. If you look at the assurance reviews that he had done, he was so frustrated—as I would have been, and as were the people who did those reviews—that it took years. Nobody shared data. They were all lawyering up to fight over who would share what data. I put it in more mild terms in the report, but when it came to report 3, which I think was like four or five years later, the guys resigned, and the thing was handed over to a statutory body in the national inspectorate and Ofsted. I thought to myself, “Okay, guys—come on. First, nobody is volunteering to find the truth here, and we owe these victims that.” Secondly, there are extremely important assurance reviews by the Greater Manchester Mayor, who is one of the long-standing Mayors. He knew what he was doing. He could not get to the bottom of it. Then you look at the 50 serious case, reviews and you look at the world of serious case reviews, and you see that, to be honest, Mr Richards, they do not get to the truth of what happens in these cases. What they find out is whether the team around the child operated effectively. That is important—do not get me wrong—but part of the team around the child are the perpetrators, who spot that the team around the child are not good enough or cannot safeguard the child enough. Do we talk about the predators in any of these serious case reviews? Did we know about these predators? Were we properly safeguarding the children? Sorry, you can tell something from my tone. I said to everyone, “I will be really measured. Don’t worry, I will not get like that about it”, but when we start talking about this, I think, “Yes, that is why I want a statutory inquiry.” And that is why it has to be national, with strong local—there is a connection between the local and national. I know it is not what everyone wanted, but I think it is absolutely the right thing to do.

The recommendations, all 12 of them, were accepted unreservedly by the Government yesterday, and I put in recommendation 12 deliberately to ensure it—apart from the fact I only like even numbers. Leave that aside—I am sorry, I am in that mood today, I can tell. It is important to make sure that we do not let the victims down again by not doing this properly. So, having gone from, “Is this the right way of spending public money?” four months ago, I think it is the right way to spend public money. We made it a recommendation so that, in six months’ time or two months’ time, people such as you are able to ask the Government what has happened with that recommendation, because it means that every time people double check on the implementation of the recommendations, one of them will be on money. To be fair, however, we only gave the Government the report about 10 days ago, and they were out yesterday responding to it. I am sure there is detail on each one of those recommendations that has to be worked through.

Thank you, Baroness Casey and your team, for such fantastic work and for turning it around so quickly. To pick up on the Alexis Jay recommendations, I noted from your executive summary that you have assumed that those recommendations will now be implemented. We have had lots of reviews, dating back to Lord Laming in 2009, and the Alexis Jay review I think took seven years. Now you are proposing another national inquiry. My big concern is for constituents who were victims of child sexual abuse—such as one of mine, Nigel O’Mara—reliving these experiences over and over again. He has told me that he has had severe mental health issues and trauma having to relive it during the Alexis Jay inquiry. Which of the Jay recommendations are you most concerned about not being implemented? You have worked on the basis they will be, but are you concerned that any of that list of 20 will not be in the near future?

There are a couple. One is the child protection authority. The Government have said that they will do that, but I suppose that that is one of the major themes in our work and that of Alexis Jay was the importance of bringing those different safeguarding and policing systems together. If we do not do that, we will continue to have this problem of—in these sorts of cases—the need to go out and look for evidence to protect children proactively, and those sorts of things. We will not get that without a very strong child protection arrangement, which is more than a safeguarding partnership that, in practice, may not work operationally as well as strategically together. That is a concern from what we have just done in looking at this and what Baroness Casey says. The history of many of these reviews tells us that that is what we have got to get sorted.

There is no reason, technically, any more to make that difficult. The sharing of data is probably easier now than at any time in my entire career, and it is not expensive. It is just getting the safeguards around privacy right, but I think we often use the safeguards on privacy to protect our own agency interest and not share data. Alexis Jay was right about that and we totally support it in what we found.

I note that recommendation 7 in your report calls for changes to the way that police share data across boundaries—I am thinking particularly of my own area and of county lines drug gangs, which you referenced at the start. You mention that it needs changing, but you do not go as far as saying that it needs a whole new IT system for policing. How can you square the circle there? It feels like there needs to be an overhaul and a completely new system in place to make sure that we avoid these things slipping through the cracks at police boundaries.

Partly, but police IT systems tend to evoke lots of sighs and rolling of eyes. I do not know how many police systems that we have seen with big IT ideas that have not quite materialised as they planned. Some of the good work that we have seen, such as the Tackling Organised Exploitation team, which is funded by the Home Office, and some of the action taken in other areas, means that you do not actually have to create a whole new IT system. You can use all sorts of tools to read existing systems. This is not like saying “40 years hence we will have a new system. Everyone is going to switch it on and it is going to work.” It is modern technology that probably allows for that to happen. I do not think that we are waiting for a brand-new IT system, and we have seen plenty of good arrangements in areas that have overcome that, and the TOEX schemes are really helpful at developing tools to help police to do the job that they need to, rather than waiting.

I think that my living nightmare is saying to any statutory organisation, dare I say even the civil service, “I tell you what we need is a big digital overhaul,” and the coffin of that two or three years down the line. I have never been asked to audit that, but I am sure I would not have to look very far. Sarah is absolutely right. For example, Bedfordshire Police—small but mighty—have piloted a really straightforward way of doing a police intelligence database, and the TOEX thing is there for the taking. What we did not want to do is give everybody an excuse to say, “We cannot do all this because it is going to take us 300 years and £300 million to have a think about it.” We instead say, “No, there are things right there, right now that tech companies can offer you, and you also have expertise in your own organisation. Can we crack on and do it please, rather than spending 300 years having a digital overhaul that will not overhaul anything?”

Thank you for your audit and report, and also for coming here today—the whole Committee really appreciates it. I am a Scottish MP, and the vast majority of not just what is in your report but Alexis Jay’s recommendations cover devolved issues. Much of what is in there, such as a lack of mandatory reporting and gaps in data, could equally apply in Scotland as well. I am a bit concerned that it is not getting sufficient attention or scrutiny north of the border, and that we do not have a similar push up there, so I want to be reassured that that is not the case. Do you have any thoughts on that? While you were doing your audit, were you contacted by, or did you communicate with, any Scottish organisations or devolved institutions?

I do not think we did. Something to do with Glasgow has just passed through my mind, but I am not entirely sure why—there was certainly a case in Glasgow. What I would say to anywhere in our country is: do not just read this report and think that it may not happen to you. What Mr Maguire said is quite right. Places like Cornwall, until county lines came on the map, may not have been places where this type of exploitation would have been obvious. It might have been, or it might not have been. Of course, Police Scotland is Police Scotland; you merged your police services several years ago into one Police Scotland, so your data sharing should technically be more effective.

It isn’t. We still have the old IT systems.

Then they should have less of a barrier to merging those databases and having something over the top that would be helpful to them. Even if they were to do that, what you then have to do is get all your local authorities and your health sector onboard to share the data on vulnerable children. In Scotland, frankly, that should be easier, given the size of both your population and your statutory sector, than trying to do it across the whole of England; but it is often the cultural barriers that get in the way, not the logistical barriers. I am sure it is an issue for Scotland.

In terms of other devolved areas, we spoke with colleagues in Wales, where the patterns are pretty similar with children’s services and sharing. It was interesting that, although the systems are slightly different, the picture was similar.

Do you have any thoughts about whether the national inquiry should have official input from devolved Governments, so that we can get that broadbrush learning across the UK?

I would be disappointed if the opportunity of the national criminal investigation was missed—because, let’s face it, I can move from Scotland to England pretty easily, and criminals do. Another missed opportunity alongside that would be at least the learnings of the national inquiry. What I have in my mind is something slightly different from a seven-year, judge-led inquiry. Ideally we would have something that got into local areas; it is a matter for Scotland to decide whether it would want to have some sort of relationship with the national commission, inquiry or whatever it ends up being called, but criminals move to wherever they can get their prey, and with the internet they do that even more quickly and easily. That is an issue internationally, not just between the devolved nations, so I think it is important that there is some join-up across certainly Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England on these sorts of issues. That is where my perhaps over-obsession, on a nerd level, with getting the IT right is a pragmatic way of joining up those systems. Given where we are, even I, with this ink pen, understand how easy that is now as opposed to even two or three years ago.

Just as an observation, in some of the bigger police forces in England that we spoke to—the Met Police, for example, or Greater Manchester Police—they are taking an approach where they successfully apply serious and organised crime tactics and operational approaches to child sexual exploitation. That helps them to corral the local police organisation within their much broader area: they have an oversight of what is going on, they talk to their districts, they bring everything into the centre and they apply more resourcing where there are complex cases. That may be something that Police Scotland is already doing, but that is an approach that we endorse and that we recommend applying more widely.

I agree about the IT systems and how crucial that is—but if you are not collecting accurate, robust data, it does not really matter what IT system you have, right? Can you talk more about the gaps in the data? You mentioned ethnicity, but are there any other egregious examples that you think we should remedy now? It seems to me extraordinarily urgent that we start collecting robust, comprehensive data now—otherwise, it will affect the national inquiry. Did that also affect your ability to perform this audit effectively? What did those challenges look like?

Yes, it did affect our ability. Our job was to assess the scale of group-based child sexual exploitation, and on that we have not been able to provide an answer because of the data systems. That starts from the fact that we do not have a robust, up-to-date prevalence survey, so we do not know how much child sexual abuse there is in the country. There are a few reasonably educated estimates, but we do not have anything up to date. The last one that was accurate was 12 years ago or something, so you can start at that point and ask, “What are we looking for? How much is going on?” Then we can see whether people are coming to services. To your first point, we estimate 500,000 children a year are sexually abused under the umbrella of sexual abuse in different forms. Beyond that, the next piece of information is the policing reports of child sexual abuse. Some of that is flagged when it is child sexual exploitation, but police flags are notoriously poor. They are not used well, and when we talked to police forces and looked at their problem profiles, we found that the flags were not being used that well. There is an estimate that tells you that there are 17,000 CSE crimes a year, but we cannot necessarily rely on that. Two years ago, the child sexual exploitation taskforce, which is a national policing capability, started asking police to send them their data. They are basically analysing that manually to look at the number of child sexual abuse cases that fall into sexual exploitation and are carried out by more than two people. That is what they have to do, and it is an incredibly difficult and labour-intensive exercise. That told us that there were 719 group-based child sexual exploitation crimes in 2023. We started up there at half a million a year and we get down to 700 crimes. Because most child sexual abuse is not reported anyway, we have a massive underestimate of what is happening. But that is the best we got after however many years of saying that we really need to collect that information.

What needs to happen now to ensure that that does not happen in the national inquiry?

The Government have accepted that the CSE taskforce will collect data in a more robust way, so we will get some of that. We have said that we need mandatory collection of ethnicity data when it comes to child sexual abuse, and the Government have accepted that. At the moment, I think it is not totally mandatory and is all done by encouragement.

It is all done by encouragement at the moment.

We think it needs to be mandatory.

To be fair, it was Theresa May, a bit into her term as Home Secretary, who wanted the flagging process. She wanted that because having said “Press on” at the beginning of her term, she realised—I am not speaking for her as I have not asked her, but my judgment is that she thought—I need to get across CSE. We then introduced this flagging process because when somebody is arrested the series of crimes that you are labelling is quite complicated. That said, all these years later, I draw the conclusion that for that not to have been implemented more effectively is not good enough. I then put that together with where we are in 2025 and think that there must be better, both technical and other, solutions as to how you would get that right if you really wanted to.

I briefly attended a session last week. I was in between meetings, but I popped into an APPG meeting on missing people. I understand that there is a different approach to “missing” being piloted in Scotland around return interviews, the recording of data and so on. It has always felt to me, and you referenced it in the report, that because of the lack of consistency around the way police record “missing” and the way that local authorities consider it, those children who are missing are the children being exploited for county lines and by grooming gangs. You talked about 10 years ago; we were trying to put this together 10 years ago and say, “You need to join this up.”

One of the things I am hoping for is a big move on consent, and the reason I am pushing for it is because it is symbolic of what we think about children. The way we come at “missing” at the moment—and these are good people trying to do it—feels very much as if it is done in terms of asking how many times somebody has gone missing and whether we are getting the return interviews right. That feels very transactional, and it is missing a bigger point. I hope that if anybody in the room has teenage or adolescent girls, and they disappeared overnight and switched their Find My Friends app off, you would be absolutely beside yourselves. But because we are dealing with kids who have not come from that sort of situation, we, as a state, attempt to have a safety net. Even though “missing” is important, and there are “missing taskforces” and that sort of thing, that safety net does not grasp the bigger picture. I think it is fair play to West Yorkshire Police, which has an analyst, Paul Smith. Often in public service you find individuals, and you think, “Wow.” After Rotherham had happened, he developed what they call an algorithm. I’m not sure it is an algorithm, but essentially, he said if we put together “missing more than twice”, and put it across kids in children’s homes, I think, or children in need, then across whether they had ever been on the radar of the criminal justice system, and hey presto—we have a completely different cohort. I think that we say, as a system—and I include myself in this—“missing” is really important, but then it really turns into a transaction rather than, “Oh dear God, where is this child?” Now, if we had rape laws that meant that when said child has gone out all night with said perpetrator and his friends, we will do said perpetrator and his friends for rape, it changes the conversation of the state, really, because rape is seen, quite rightly, as one of the most terrible things that can happen, and particularly terrible if it happens to children. In a way, I am trying to use the opportunity of this audit to say, “How do we reset how we think about children?” It is also why I am so concerned about the whole children’s services side of this, in that I think they do not even see those children. If you look at “missing” and who is on the child in need list—at the moment, they just have “neglect” for most of these kids. I think there are some very profound questions to be asked about what is happening around children who are missing. We call it a red flag. You think that there will be some sort of booming noise, or that a beep should go off on my phone when Louise Casey goes missing—I am sure there are plenty of politicians who wish that was possible—but it is not like that. It is more like, “Well, have you got the return home interview right?” I think that we are not in the right place on it. It screams out of the voices of the kids in this report.

It is the lack of joining up on all of this between all the agencies.

Exactly.

I was thinking earlier about the time when you were leading on troubled families, and I worked with you on that. The joining up made all the difference, and we simply have not joined up on all of these different red flags, which should be front and centre, and on the agencies. I am afraid that there is a tendency to tick the box and think, “I’ve done my job. I’ve covered myself, and I’ve covered my colleagues, but I’m not going to apply judgment and I’m not going to join this up.” That needs to change.

I 100% agree.

First, I thank all three of you for the very important report that you have produced. I want to go back to the question of when you decided to call for a national inquiry. We had Alexis Jay and Tom Crowther here. You said that your own views evolved about the need for a national inquiry. I cannot tell you how disappointing it was to read those pages in your report about the timeline of how little has happened over the years. I worked on anti-trafficking for four years, and I have spent so much time reading reviews like this and submitting evidence. There have been taskforces, reviews and inquiries. My question is: how do we ensure that there is not more delay? I completely understand your reasons for calling for this new national inquiry, which you have set out comprehensively. But how do we stop people in the system using it by saying, “Well, that is for the national inquiry; we’re not going to move forward on that”? We will have the Home Secretary at this Committee in six months’ time. About which of your recommendations should we ask her, “Have these been implemented yet?” That is so we can use your report as a fire break, so there is action and not just more discussion.

To the last question, there is so much that we could want to come from the audit findings, and we deliberately zeroed in on 12. We looked at what we thought would be the most significant 12 to get the biggest change possible. Obviously, I have strong views on other areas, such as serious case reviews—just to put that back in—but we zeroed in on 12. In six months’ time, I would like you to hold the Government to account for what action has happened on all 12, and I do not think that is unreasonable. If I had done 300, 200 or even 50, I think that would get tricky, but we did 12 knowing that we wanted some big shifts. On the national inquiry, you have to see the national inquiry and the national criminal—what is it called?

Investigation.

Investigation—sorry, it has been a long 12 hours. You have to see the national criminal investigation and the national inquiry as almost conjoined. They cannot be, for different reasons, because we need the Inquiries Act statutory powers available to the national inquiry. I listened to what the Home Secretary said in Parliament yesterday, and I would like to see quite a significant uplift in the prosecutions, actions and criminal investigations on child sexual exploitation, both historic and current. I am very mindful of what Mr Maguire said about some historic victims who really do not need to be brought before more national inquiries to account for what has gone on. Unless they want to, I do not think that we need lots of victims who have already given evidence elsewhere. What I am concerned to do with the national criminal investigation is go after the criminals whose victims have not got justice. It is where there is a gap, or where the prosecutions were not good enough—that is the first thing. Secondly, in the recommendations we have put what I think is a formula for how the national inquiry could think about where that takes you locally. There are some places where people may want to crack on in the shorter term. Certainly, over time—I do not think it needs to be forever—if you had areas where there clearly have not been local criminal convictions, and suddenly we are finding them, you would have to ask yourself, “Why are we finding them now? Why did we not see those children 10 or 20 years ago?” A lot of this has to be driven by victims, and it has to be proportionate around the victims. We see them jointly together. Because of the publicity, which is sad in some ways but important in others, and the political attention that this issue has had—it has not even been 24 hours since that report was laid in the House, and I am before you with my team—I hope that they show that this is a line in the sand. The 12 things that we are asking for are not impossible or pipe dreams; they are achievable.

Thank you for that. I have a couple other questions. First—this is a genuine question—one of the things that was missing from the report is any discussion of the pandemic and the huge impact that it had on child protection and the way in which abuse is perpetrated. Would you like to say anything about that?

Well, if you want to ask me to do another report in six months on that issue, I would be—I will not say happy to do so—open to negotiations. The truth is that there is a huge dynamic at play around what has happened since the pandemic, not just in crime but in the lives of children and what is going on. I was quite vocal during the pandemic that we ought to look at the implications of it, and that we should not leave people behind. I am still of that view on a personal level, but this piece of work could not stray too far from establishing the facts in relation to child sexual exploitation by gangs, and we had only three months to do it in. I can assure you that, of all the projects I have been involved with over the years, this has been tough to achieve in the time. I had to ask for a two-week extension just to double down on the final facts and to be sure about the data we were getting from colleagues in police forces who wanted to clean it before it went public. It was quite tough to get just this body of work down in three months. I am sorry that we did not get to wider issues, and I think it is really important that somebody does; I would support that.

Another question. You talked about how important it is to collect ethnicity and race data, and you set out really comprehensively why that is the case, but I am thinking about other kinds of group child sexual exploitation that we have seen. There have been significant cases in the Catholic Church. In my city of Edinburgh, there have also been significant challenges in boarding schools. I wonder whether there are other data points we should be collecting. Religion, for example, would be one, but are there other markers? I just wonder why ethnicity and race have been singled out so specifically. I understand why, but why not others?

Chapter 4 of the report looks at what we call the nature and characteristics of group-based child sexual exploitation. It is not an academic exercise of interest to find out what it looks like. It is for important reasons of understanding offending and, by understanding it better, being able to tackle it better. There is a whole range of things in that chapter, including ethnicity. Ethnicity stands out as one of the areas where data collection has been really poor, where it has been seen as an optional extra, but there are lots of others in there, and we have spoken about some of them. For example, understanding the vulnerability factors associated with victims, such as missing episodes and so on, can be really important in better tackling offending. All the demographic information is important, and we go through it all in that chapter. I would say that applies more broadly to crime in general. It is really important to understand who is being affected by crime and who is committing it. Where there is over-representation of certain sections of society, whatever that might be—age, sex, religion, culture, nationality, ethnicity—that is important to understand in order to work out how you better protect the victims and prosecute the perpetrators.

The other interesting thing about this, after having been around a long time, is that you do not always have to collect national data. You could have done a deep dive. Policymaking can be done in many different ways. The issue is that people do not always find looking at ethnicity straightforward in certain circumstances. In some ways, they find it really easy to look at it—look at the Metropolitan Police and black Londoners. There is an irony in that sometimes we decide to find this data writ large and other times we decide not to. I would add religion to that as well. You could easily run a deep dive into a set of data to establish all sorts of drivers, but nobody’s bothered—sorry, that is too harsh. Nobody has seen it as a priority. My main view about these things is that if the good people don’t grasp difficult issues, there are plenty of bad people out there who will grasp them for you. I am always a believer in that. No matter who is in power—I have worked for several Prime Ministers and several different Administrations over the years—my advice to everybody is always: get ahead of trouble and grasp it, because you are a good person, and there are plenty of people out there who grasp the bad stuff and make it even worse than it needs to be.

Absolutely. You mention in your report—

Sorry; Alexis Jay and her team—her fellow commissioners—did an absolutely stunning job of holding institutions like the Catholic Church and the Church of England to account, and children’s homes. Journalists and victims pushed it and pushed it, and she lifted that lid and showed it for what it was. I hope that nobody, in the Catholic Church or others, denies what happened and what their priests did to children, and if they do, they should face the same consequences as any other individual. Sorry, I felt that was important to say, because we should not think that Alexis Jay and her team left anything that they shouldn’t have left. They did a really good job and we need to implement the findings. We need to own the fact that large institutions, unless they are careful, can go easily into losing their way. That is every institution, I think, not just religious institutions.

Thank you, Baroness Casey. I want to ask about the national referral mechanism and its interplay here. You talk about the 49% increase in NRM referrals for sexual exploitation since 2020. The NRM is kind of broken right now. How useful a tool is it for addressing the challenges that you have seen in your audit? I want specifically to ask about the pilot for devolved decision making. I asked the Home Secretary about this yesterday and she has committed to rolling it out. Do you think that will move the dial on this? Am I pushing in the right direction there?

We looked at the national referral mechanism and the data on those who come into it for reasons of child sexual exploitation. We were looking at it to try to understand the scale and nature and whether this was a different path in. We did not really go into the policy of it. Again, within the time, we were not able to interrogate it, but it was interesting from our perspective to think about the trafficking side of child sexual exploitation, which comes up a lot. Obviously, the way that children end up in the NRM is very interesting; they should be ending up on a different route. We did not really look at how the policy has developed, so this is probably not the right area for us to comment on.

I am going to bring in Paul Kohler.

Baroness Casey, I want to go back to the point you made about victims a few minutes ago. I totally understand the reason why we must not re-traumatise them. I watched “Newsnight” last night and was hugely moved by the testimony of the two victims who appeared with you. I was also hugely impressed by their ideas and their desire for change. Have you any thoughts on how we might use victims—creatively, not just as passive givers of evidence—who want to help us to change the system?

That is really good point, Mr Kohler. My understanding is that the new Government want to establish a victims’ panel precisely for that purpose: to involve them in the policymaking and decisions. I do not know where that is at, because I do not work for the Home Office, but if you wanted to ask it about that, I think that would be a really good thing to ask it about. It made that commitment publicly, and I am not sure where it is at. The purpose of that panel is to go a bit beyond reliving your trauma and a bit more into specifics. It is a really interesting point you make, actually; in some ways, the “Newsnight” piece and various others are allowing people publicly to say what they think should shift. I am really open to that. The session we had with survivors and victims was less about the trauma they experienced and more about what they think should happen now and what type of things would help them. We covered off a range of things. They feel that nobody is straight or candid and that they do not really know what is going on. It was not just about their own cases; it was wider. That is another part of why we came to the view that we should settle on a national inquiry. The other part of the national inquiry with its local footprints is that it would be helpful to ensure that, yes, inquiries are there to establish the facts, to apportion blame—to use inquiry language—and to make sure that it does not happen again, but it would be a missed opportunity not to use that victim’s voice to say, “So what specific things do you think we need to change?” When I was the Victims’ Commissioner in 2010 and 2011 under the coalition, I remember meeting victims, and one of the specific things that one of the families wanted was that prisoners who had been convicted of killing their partners should not be able to arrive at a court of justice in family proceedings and argue for custody directly with the family whose mother they had killed. My jaw dropped. Here I am thinking, “I know a bit about the world,” and I had no concept that we allowed that to happen. It seems like a very small change, but I think it was one that that Government or their successor Conservative Government put through, because of those victims. I introduced them to various Ministers and it went forward from there. I was struck last night both by Fiona and by how practical they are in terms of what they think should change. I think that is always helpful.

I have an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill on the issue of parental rights for offenders, and I hope the Government will do something positive on that. We will move on to the national inquiry and local inquiries.

Baroness Casey, let me say a huge thank you to you and your whole team for the amount of work that you have put in to producing these recommendations. It is hugely appreciated. I want to focus my questions on the national inquiry, and local inquiries as well. I refer to page 137 of your report, in which you make reference to Greater Manchester and Rochdale as two areas that have shown a reluctance to review past events—they are not the only two areas that have shown that reluctance. You pointed to the fact that they were confident that practice had improved or that issues had been covered elsewhere, often citing other serious case reviews. I will use the example of Fiona Goddard, who I know you met last night. She was a constituent of mine, and lived in the Bradford district. She has made her views known; she waived her anonymity and has been quite critical of how decisions have been made in the past. When I spoke to her last night before the “Newsnight” interview that she did, she told me that one of her frustrations was the feeling that local authorities—I will reference Bradford Council because that is my own local authority and where she resides—are using serious case reviews, such as hers, and referencing the 2021 thematic review, which you referenced in your report. It looked only at five children—it was only a 50-page document—of whom Fiona was one. They heavily relied on that and, dare I say, her serious case review, as a reason to say that there was nothing more to see in this area. Rightly we have had the announcement that we are having a national inquiry, but we still have reluctance at a local level for any more of a spotlight to be shone across the Bradford district. What would your message be to local leaders who represent Bradford Council and the wider West Yorkshire area about how we reassure victims and survivors such as Fiona that we can have an inquiry that focuses on the Bradford district, which Fiona has called for and still calls for, as have I for a significant period of time?

I will come to Bradford. You mentioned the way that we talk about Rochdale. I may not have made myself clear earlier: I think that Andy Burnham did a good thing in Greater Manchester by saying, “I’m not happy with what is going on here.” He listened to victims, he talked to the police and to others and he tried to put in place—not tried; he did institute—assurance reviews, as they called them, to try to establish exactly what you are wishing, I think, for Bradford. Two good people did them; I met one of them, who was the commissioner in Rotherham when we were there. Those people only got so far because, essentially, they could not require people to give them information; they could not require people to appear before them; and they had no ability to do hearings. As we put in the report, it went on and on, and they did this work. It took a long time before the new chief constable said, “We didn’t get this right and we say sorry to the victims.” That is why we put it in there: even when the police and crime commissioner or Mayor has said, “I want this to happen” and money is spent making it happen, it has not got him what he wanted, which was accountability on behalf of the victims and what happened with the system. That is why, again, doubling down, looking at that and having interviewed various people, we came to the view that without statutory, Inquiries Act-type powers you are not going to get anywhere. I agree that if you are Bradford or any of the areas in my report published yesterday that are visible and identifiable, just be ready and open to the fact that you may be the subject of one of the national inquiries. I would be surprised if some of the areas that I mention, probably including Bradford, were not subject to being part of the national inquiry. It is absolutely right that Members of Parliament, victims and other people are able to say, “We want this to happen here.” That should be balanced out with an evidence-based and data-led approach to looking at where you would start and where you would head. Mr Moore, today I did not want to get into, “This is my hit list”—let’s use common parlance—or, “This is where I think we should start,” because I do not think that was my job. My job was to establish a different set of facts. Do I think that whoever takes that role on can look at the audit and make that part of their decision-making process? I probably would. Having met Fiona and seen her previously on “Newsnight”—good for them for giving her that voice—I am sensing that the Government will need to move relatively quickly on making headway in starting a criminal national inquiry, running into some of these local inquiries and getting on with them. The sooner we get on with them, the sooner we can get accountability on the table. Even if we can never, ever, do right by the victims—at the end of the day, the people who did those crimes are the perpetrators—we can at least get the system to look at where it needs to apologise, where it should be accountable and where it should make redress. I am sorry—that was a very long-winded answer to your question, but I thought it was important to be as open as possible about what I think.

I really appreciate your response. The excuses at a local level were first about it being too expensive and therefore not warranted. Then it turned into the idea that we would learn nothing new. An element of communication is coming out from Bradford Council, and, dare I say it, our West Yorkshire Mayor as well, and very much reiterating your report when you were referencing other places such as, originally, Greater Manchester and Rochdale, before things changed under Mayor Burnham. If we still have this reluctance to accept that a spotlight needs to be shone on the Bradford district, do you feel that your recommendations are providing the Home Secretary with enough of a direction and powers to be able to ensure that a spotlight could, should it be chosen, be shone there?

The first thing to say is that, naively really, I did not necessarily see that the Prime Minister saying that he wanted a national inquiry on Saturday would somehow turn into quite the big deal that it did. Perhaps that is my naivety: my head is right in the middle of the victims and what we should be doing. Perhaps I misjudged that slightly. I absolutely thought that this was the right thing to do. To be fair, there was decisiveness from the Government, basically within a week, saying, “Okay—we’re going to do this.” Then the inquiry was announced on Saturday, and the full announcement of the law changes, the criminal investigation and the inquiry, because they are a package—I urge people to consider them as a package—was made only yesterday. I think that is pretty good going in my career, in getting Governments to do things I want them to do. I felt quite all right about that, actually, last night. By the time I tripped over to “Newsnight”, I thought, “Job done, mate.” But I take what you are saying and I understand it. What I would say is that the Home Secretary made clear yesterday the Government’s commitment to all of what was in there, including a national inquiry with local footprints. It is the same Home Secretary who in January said, “Here I am. I think there’s something that needs to be looked at here. Here are five local inquiries. We are going to follow the Telford model, which many people across the political divide have supported.” Nobody came forward. She will have noted that herself. We discussed it when we met, between my handing in the report and now, and had the same conversation about why I have shifted my position, and she herself noted that areas didn’t exactly knock her door down to want to do these local inquiries. The statutory inquiry powers were announced on Saturday. They were given in full to the House yesterday. I would urge any area of the country—Bradford or anywhere—to think carefully about not being open to scrutiny and to change. I realise it is nerve-racking, because in the midst of all this are some human beings who are leaders. I don’t mean political leaders necessarily, but social workers, team leaders, police officers—we all know that when it gets nasty, they are named, and very nasty people can do very nasty things to them. You all know that; you’re MPs. Other public servants do, too. So we have to be careful about not scapegoating people and creating a sort of hatemonger thing. At the same time, we have to make sure that we get the inquiries right and that people are held to account locally. I would say to anybody who can see themselves in this report, “Be open to it.” You are telling me what we wrote. You are absolutely right. There are areas that have said, “We have done serious case reviews. Therefore we don’t need to do anything.” That is not the case when you look at the serious case reviews; it does not answer the question. The public may think—I used to—that serious case reviews are a way of saying, “What actually happened, how can we not get it wrong again and who is accountable for not getting it right?” That is not what they have done and that is not what they do, so you can’t use them as a reason not to do an investigation when you are looking at these issues. I would say that to Bradford and anywhere else in the country. I would caution against doing that and would say, “Let’s be open. Let’s use this as a moment to draw a line and to have a national reset.” That is what I would say.

Thank you. Openness, transparency, and accountability are incredibly important; that is absolutely noted. This brings me on to my next question, which has to do with the terms of reference potentially associated with the national inquiry. I know that West Yorkshire Police fed into your report and helped with, I suspect, the recommendations that you came to, but one of the concerns that gets raised to me is that this issue is multifaceted—that has been picked up in some of the comments that you have made today. It is not just about police forces; it is about local authorities—in fact, it is about any organisation—

The CPS.

Any organisation that effectively has safeguarding responsibility, including the CPS. So how do you envisage the terms of reference being established, and how do you envisage getting cross-Government buy-in? Yes, it was the Home Secretary who made the announcement, but actually this cuts across every Government Department, so would you like to expand on that?

Could I add to that? This is the question I put to the Home Secretary yesterday: how do you make sure that you do not prejudice criminal trials? Clearly, in the inquiry, we want openness and honesty, but sometimes that openness and honesty is provided on condition of some form of amnesty or a lack of prosecution, and we cannot have a situation in an inquiry where we find that a perpetrator who is guilty of potentially many crimes cannot then be prosecuted because the inquiry has taken evidence. How are we going to ensure that does not happen?

The issue of misconduct in public office is always quite a tricky one to investigate and prosecute—if that’s where you end up; sorry, I am not suggesting that one does. It has always been quite tricky, that one. To be honest, in the three-month sprint to get to where we are—no, West Yorkshire Police were not involved in the recommendations. We took from West Yorkshire Police the Smith algorithm and the good work that they are doing in terms of organised and criminal exploitation. We took their data, analysed it and went backwards and forwards over that, but the recommendations are very much ours and mine. Frankly, there was not masses of consultation. In fact, I don’t think we consulted with anyone because this was a contested and tricky thing, and it is on my shoulders to attempt to get that right. So no: we did not enter into a process of consultation with anybody at all. As to the detail of how you get all of that right, I honestly think there are a few things. You have to get the terms of reference right. Do I think that is an impossible task? No, I don’t. Do I think that people might use excuses as to why you cannot do these things, because of the very reasons you said? That is a possibility. Do I think we should all watch that very carefully? Yes, I do. Do I think we can crack on with this? Yes, we can. The Inquiries Act gives scope to do things in different ways. We do not always have to do them exactly the same way. That is what the Inquiries Act gives us, and if it needs to change, there is a Government in power that can change it. I have not really scoped out and got to the detail of the terms of reference, but I think it is pretty clear what we want and why we want it. I think the Government have accepted it unreservedly, and I have huge confidence in them across the board to implement it. I have to say, I thought it was quite a moment to see the Government Front Bench yesterday, with women right across the board. The Home Secretary was surrounded by her Secretaries of State, and other people who are active, and a lot of parliamentarians across the political divide have contacted me in the last 12 hours to say thank you and well done. That goes completely across the political spectrum—it really does.

We have a couple more questions, if that is okay.

Carrying on with the national enquiry, it is co-ordinating a number of local inquiries and drawing generic lessons from that. Do you envisage it going further? This sorry, awful tale of systemic failure in the body politic at every level—local, regional and national—was also a failure of self-reflection, as we saw in the House yesterday. Are you envisaging it talking about the failures at every level of government, including national?

The important thing about giving the panel or the inquiry chair or chairs statutory powers of that nature is that they are able to go wherever they think they need to go.

That is a good answer.

Well, it’s the truth.

We set out a prescription under that recommendation to a degree. Obviously, it is for Government to work out how they detail that, but having an independent commission overseeing that, agreeing set terms of reference and timescales and so on, is an important part of that process. It is in setting the terms of reference that scope is determined, as well as in how the Inquiries Act powers are applied and used, for example, to overcome conflicts of evidence with criminal and other prosecutions, and so on.

So you do not see it as restricted to just co-ordinating the regional inquiries?

Absolutely.

It is evidence led.

My final question might be premature, and you might not want to comment on it, but do you have any thoughts on the cultural and societal drivers that were at the heart of these grooming gangs? Is that something you feel able to comment on at this stage?

I would like to see us take this carefully and properly. What I feel we know needs to be done—even just intuitively since Rotherham, but certainly now that the evidence is there—is that one ought to collect data properly. At the same time, it will be a difficult and challenging piece of work to do. I do not often ask for new research in anything that I do—I am a “Let’s get on with it”-type women—but I think in this situation we need a bespoke piece of research that looks into whether there are cultural drivers, religious or otherwise. That is not unusual in crime fighting. I think there is a sense that that would be an unusual thing to do. It is not; it means you know. It is quite normal to look at a threat and then investigate and understand what that threat is—why it is, how it is, who they are, where they come from, what they might be doing, what type of people they are, whether they are rich or poor. There are lots of things that you look at around drivers. If we had looked at it in that way, and had done this a few years ago, perhaps we would not be where we are now. It is not often that I recommend research, as you probably are aware, but I do on this occasion.

I, too, want to thank you for all the work that you and your team have done on this. You said at the beginning that you were not sure if you had done enough, but I think that is a huge disservice to yourself. You have been writing recommendations for a long time, and perhaps if people had listened to them, things might be a bit different. In terms of those recommendations and some of the work that will be going on, I wanted to ask about inquiries. A lot of the time we find that inquiries go ahead when there has been huge moral outrage, and we want something to be done. I understand that data needs to be collected—that is very clear—but inquiries are notorious for being costly and lengthy. I was pleased to see that there is going to be a time limit on this one. What is that time limit, roughly?

I think in what we have said so far, we have suggested three years—certainly, initially. You should be thinking about getting the national and local bit done within three years. That is partly why we are looking for flexibility about the inquiry model, and looking for a team effort, rather than a single individual running hearings. I am probably saying more than I should at this stage—but why not? You asked a question, so I am answering it. We are of the view that this is achievable; we just need some creative thinking from colleagues in the civil service to help to make it happen.

Can we hope for some interim reporting that might help to push things forward a bit quicker?

I thought what was interesting about Alexis Jay and the way she did her report is that she did regular reports. That was a really good model, and I was appreciative of that, as somebody who was following what she was finding and what we should do. Again, I know that is not what other inquiries do, but I thought Alexis Jay and her team did that well. Why would you wait? If you have a local inquiry done somewhere, you do not need to wait three years before you publish it. You need to get it out there, get on with it, and get people moving on.

The 12 recommendations you have put forward at the moment have all been accepted. You have already said to colleagues today that there are not any particular recommendations that we should be pushing for. Slightly differently to that, I wanted to ask whether the Government have the full capacity to implement them, and are there any that they might find more difficult than others that we might be able to push on?

I think there will probably be an awful lot of people who think that we do not need to change the consent law. I think those people will be legal eagles who say that the law is already there, and we use it. I would caution that. The number of rape convictions for under 13-year-olds is double that for those between 13 and 16—Sarah kindly reminded of that fact this morning, so I was ready in case anybody said we should not change consent. You have very kindly not asked me that question, which has been marvellous. I am worried about that one. Well, I am not worried about it, but worried societally about it—not about the Government. The other one that I think will be difficult for the Government to get right is that quashing convictions is not going to be straightforward. With quashing convictions, when you have got a single crime—prostitution—the Government have committed to, and they recommitted to it again yesterday. I can see how you would pick that particular crime: you search “prostitution”, you go and find, and then you quash convictions—brilliant. I am making that sound straightforward because I am conscious of time; it will not be as straightforward as I have said. The problem about child sexual exploitation is that in some of the cases it is not prostitution alone. It could be criminal damage. It might be that the young woman introduced her friend to these people, and then she has been done for essentially introducing a child to sex abuse—or whatever that criminal charge is.

Inciting a child.

Inciting a child. So I think it will take a bit more than, “Hello, why don’t you go to the Court of Appeal and get that sorted?” That just won’t cut it, so people like me, the victims themselves and outstanding organisations like the Centre for Women’s Justice will continue to deal with victims who have not been heard sufficiently, and we will look at how to quash their convictions, which will take more effort and complexity; it is not straightforward. Those would be my two points. Some of these legal eagle changes are quite tricky, but I really want the people who have done these crimes locked up. In the noise and haste over inquiries, I would urge such an auspicious, powerful Committee as this to ensure not just that the Government and the Home Secretary, but that the police and all other parties—the people who can help the police in health and children’s services—bring the men who perpetrate these crimes to justice so we can lock them up.

I have two very quick questions.

Very quick.

I welcome the fact that you have challenged the issue of race quite robustly, but I note that it has been quite loud, even within the report and the Home Secretary’s statement. As we have touched on, the issues of asylum seekers, immigration and race can be synonymous, but a lot of the time these issues are about closed patriarchal groups of men, which, as we have pointed out, exist in all races and all ethnicities—they even exist in this House. They are the scourge of the Earth, if you want to call them that. How do we focus on targeting them? Sometimes, when that noise comes about, as it has in this reporting, it shifts the focus away from the victims, and that has been the saddest thing. We have focused on groups of perpetrators, not the victims.

That is a really important point, and a good question. Dare I say that I almost feel that, because we have not done the job right around collecting ethnicity information properly, the bigger issue—men’s violence towards women—is in danger of being lost. All of us in society—there are so many good men—need to step into the space of helping to do something about that, not just about child abuse but more generally. If we are still arguing about ethnicity data, we will not get to the bigger issue, which is why men, no matter their ethnicity, religion, age or whatever, commit these offences against girls. You can say, “Some are women, some are men, and there are boy victims,” but the child sex abuse we are talking about today is largely—if not nearly all—men against girls, some of whom are young. I am with you on that, but I think that until we get this stuff sorted at a policy level, the point you are making will continue to be missed.

Finally, on the victims and what seems to be happening overall, some of my colleagues have already touched on the agencies that are involved. It seems that we already have quite robust legislation to protect children, and you could apply it in a certain way. I suppose we even have good legislation on rape, in that you can receive a certain conviction; the problem is that people don’t actually get to court. It seems that these issues of child sex abuse don’t get to the point where they are prosecuted. On the issue of agencies not talking to each other, it is not clear from the reports that a lot of these young people have come from care. They are from particular socioeconomic backgrounds and in certain situations. How do we get the focus from the justice element, which is important, to actually putting resources into tackling the root causes and where the victims are coming from? The focus of the work is important, in terms of tackling the crime, but we know that some of these children are coming from particular situations, and we never seem to be doing enough on that.

At this point in my life, I wonder whether we will ever be able to do enough to protect children if we do not establish how to have families who are able to look after their children in such a way that they do not end up in difficulty. Good families end up with kids in difficulty, too, incidentally—don’t get me wrong. Today has been about a particular issue, but I think back to when I was working on homelessness in my 20s, antisocial behaviour in my 30s, respect and family intervention in my 40s, and troubled families in my 50s, through to integration reviews and, during covid, back to trying to help families, and what goes right across them is exactly what you are saying. If we prioritise children over and over—today, I am asking people to prioritise children who are adolescents and teenagers as well—and did right about them as a society, which is why the rape conviction rate means a great deal to all of us on the team, then we are starting to talk again about what kids are. I have had a long go at looking at—what do we call it?—social exclusion, social mobility, social justice, troubled families. I am now before the Home Affairs Committee and the issues are the same; we just look at them through different lenses. I am really conscious that—I am with you, but—right now there are victims of this particular type of crime who we are not doing enough for. We need to do a bit more for them, but it does not mean that we give up on all the others.

Will you indulge one short question from Jake Richards?

Just because your sister is a special adviser to the Home Secretary, that does not mean you get you special treatment, Mr Richards.

I would hope so—and it won’t get you any special treatment from me, either.

Sorry, I was only joking about your sister. That is a very fair question. I am not a massive fan of constant commissioners, to be honest. I have been one and I have not been one, and I think that at the end of the day, Ministers are accountable for the policies that they are elected to deliver—you have a Safeguarding Minister, a Home Secretary, a Secretary of State for Education. I am not saying that the commissioners in other roles are not there, but I do not want someone sitting across the corridor basically saying, “They’re not doing a good enough job,” when I could have someone sitting on the other side of the corridor getting the job done. There has to be a balance. You are about to set up a change in law, which will be extraordinary in history for kids in this country; you are about to set up a national criminal investigation that will take millions of pounds to get right; and you are going to run a national inquiry. You will have figureheads for each of those, who can appear before you to be held to account—not the inquiry one, because you will not be able to do that until they have finished. They are very publicly accountable for what they are doing, so I would probably argue that you do not need another. You also have a very good independent Domestic Abuse Commissioner in Dame Nicole Jacobs. I do not think we need another commissioner; I think we need to crack on.

Thank you very much. You have indulged us, as always with common sense, and appropriate comments and recommendations. I appreciate your time today, Baroness Casey, and your very extensive report, which we will come back to as a Committee. Thank you so much for being with us.