Former children’s commissioner to lead grooming gangs inquiry

A former children’s commissioner will chair the national inquiry into grooming gangs after months of delays.

Baroness Anne Longfield will lead the inquiry over three years with a budget of £65 million.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood set out the appointment and the inquiry’s terms of reference in the Commons on Tuesday.

Of her appointment, Baroness Longfield said: “The inquiry owes it to the victims, survivors and the wider public to identify the truth, address past failings and ensure that children and young people today are protected in a way that others were not.

“The inquiry will follow the evidence and will not shy away from difficult or uncomfortable truths wherever we find them.”

There has been mounting pressure on the Government to move forward with the inquiry, first announced by the Prime Minister in June.

In October, the final two candidates to be chair dropped out of the process, which led to concerns it could take months to get someone in post.

Five women also resigned from the inquiry’s victim liaison panel in a row over the scope of the probe being potentially widened.

The inquiry follows a recommendation made by Baroness Louise Casey in her rapid audit in June looking at the scale of grooming gangs across the country.

Reacting to the announcement, shadow home secretary Chris Philp said it should not have taken six months to find a chairwoman “and the threat of a vote in Parliament to agree to this inquiry in the first place”.

Baroness Longfield served as children’s commissioner from 2015 to 2021 and last year founded the Centre for Young Lives think tank aimed at improving the lives of children and families.

She was made a Labour peer earlier this year for her work on children’s rights, but will step down from the party during the inquiry, Ms Mahmood said.

The Home Secretary told MPs the probe will focus on child sex abuse committed by grooming gangs specifically, and will look at the background of offenders including their ethnicity and religion.

Baroness Casey’s findings published in June raised concerns over the lack of data showing the ethnicity and nationality of sex offenders in grooming gangs as “a major failing over the last decade or more”.

The draft terms of reference will be consulted on before being formally adopted by March.

“The inquiry will act without fear or favour, identifying individual, institutional and systemic failure, inadequate organisational responses, and failures of leadership,” she said.

“It will also work hand in hand with the police where new criminality comes to light, be that by the perpetrators or those who covered up their crimes.

“The inquiry will pass evidence to law enforcement so they can take forward any further prosecutions and put more of these evil men behind bars.”

The inquiry will have full statutory powers and will oversee a series of local investigations including in Oldham.

Ms Mahmood said Baroness Longfield will sit on a three-person panel joined by Zoe Billingham, a former inspector at HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, and Eleanor Kelly, former chief executive of Southwark Council, who supported survivors of the London Bridge terrorist attack and the Grenfell Tower disaster in 2017.

“Each individual was recommended by Baroness (Louise) Casey, and her recommendation follows recent engagement with victims,” she added.