Asylum Seekers Behind New Grooming Gang Cases

Asylum seekers and foreign nationals are involved in a “significant proportion” of live police investigations into child sex grooming gangs, an official report has warned.

On Monday, the Government released a report by Baroness Casey, which was ordered after renewed outrage over the scandal at the start of this year.

In her 200-page audit, the peer accused officials of being in “denial” about the scale of the problem and said lessons had not been learnt from crimes committed in Rotherham a decade ago.

It found that police and council leaders covered up the scale of Asian grooming gangs since concerns were first raised in 2009 because they feared being called racist.

Ahead of the release of the report, Sir Keir Starmer was forced to announce a national inquiry into the scandal in an embarrassing policy reversal. He has also ordered the National Crime Agency to carry out a nationwide investigation.

Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about Asian or Pakistani suspects grooming young white girls, Lady Casey’s review found police, local authorities and other agencies had “consistently failed” to fully acknowledge the fact or collect data so that the theory could be tested.

She also warned that when she had reviewed about a dozen live police cases, “a significant proportion of these cases appear to involve suspects who are non-UK nationals and/or who are claiming asylum in the UK”.

Neither the Office for National Statistics nor the Ministry of Justice records data on the number of crimes committed by asylum seekers or foreign nationals.

On Monday night, the Conservatives said the involvement of asylum seekers in grooming gangs must be taken seriously.

Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “I am deeply troubled to read that a significant proportion of these cases involve non-UK nationals and asylum seekers.

“This underlines the importance of securing our borders, which the Government has completely failed to do. I also call on the Government to prevent perpetrators from using human rights laws – not just asylum laws – to avoid deportation.”

A record 84,200 applications for asylum were made in the UK last year. At the end of this May, more than 14,600 migrants had crossed the Channel in small boats – up more than 30 per cent on the same point last year and the highest numbers for the first five months of a year since small boats started crossing in 2018.

Unveiling the Casey report to the House of Commons, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, said any asylum seekers found guilty of grooming children or committing sexual offences would have their applications rejected.

The Home Secretary said she would accept Lady Casey’s recommendations in full, including the mandatory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sex abuse and criminal exploitation cases, as well as improvements to the ethnicity data collected for victims.

She also said sorry for two decades of failure. Announcing the full national inquiry, she told MPs: “Those vile perpetrators who have grown used to the authorities looking the other way must have no place to hide.”

The about-turn on a national inquiry is an embarrassment to Sir Keir, who in January accused those demanding one of jumping on a “far-Right bandwagon”.

The inquiry will last about three years, although this is much shorter than other probes such as that into Covid lockdowns.

It comes 10 years after Lady Casey wrote a damning report into the culture of denial at Rotherham, South Yorkshire, where at least 1,400 children were sexually abused by grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013.

In her latest audit, she accused public bodies of having used flawed data to dismiss claims about Asian grooming gangs as “sensationalised, biased or untrue”.

“Instead of examination, we have seen obfuscation,” she wrote. “In a vacuum, incomplete and unreliable data is used to suit the ends of those presenting it. The system claims there is an overwhelming problem with white perpetrators when that can’t be proved.”

Lady Casey also referred to “examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tension”.

“Flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue,” she said. “This does a disservice to victims, and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities.”

Lady Casey found that information on the ethnicity of abusers was not recorded in two thirds of cases. But her report contained local data from three forces, which showed “clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men”.

Ms Cooper told the Commons that 800 cold cases would be investigated, a number she expected to rise to 1,000. She said: “Perpetrators of these vile crimes should be behind bars and paying the price of what they have done.”

The Home Secretary said the report found a “deep-rooted failure to treat children as children”, adding: “A continued failure to protect teenage girls from rape, from exploitation and serious violence, and from the scars that last a lifetime.

“[Lady Casey] finds … too much reliance on flawed data, too much denial, too little justice, too many criminals getting off, too many victims being let down.”

Ms Cooper said the report found children as young as 10 and those with learning difficulties were singled out for grooming.

“Perpetrators [were] walking free because no one joined up the dots or because the law protected them instead of the victims that they had exploited,” she added. “Blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions all played a part in this collective failure.”

The Home Secretary pledged to ensure that “those who engaged in cover-ups” should be prosecuted. She also delivered an apology to the victims.

“To the victims and survivors of child exploitation and grooming gangs, on behalf of this and past governments and the many public authorities who have left you down, I want to reiterate an unequivocal apology for the unimaginable pain that you have suffered and the failure of our country’s institutions for decades to prevent that harm and keep you safe,” she said.

Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, said: “The Prime Minister’s handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. After months of pressure, the Prime Minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs.”