Nazir Afzal, who was chief crown prosecutor for the north west of England from 2011 to 2015, told the Today programme this morning that he was concerned that the decision to hold a national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal could raise expectations that won’t be met. He explained:
People want accountability. I’m not sure people’s expectations will be realised.
Only criminal investigations can bring real accountability. That’s what needs to happen. Not just for those who offended, but also those who stood by and didn’t do what they were meant to do.
Unfortunately my experience with national inquiries is that they take forever and don’t deliver accountability.
Goverment announces £590m funding for Lower Thames crossing
Ministers have pledged another half a billion pounds for the Lower Thames crossing as part of the government’s 10-year plan for infrastructure, PA Media reports. PA says:
The further £590m – out of the budgets announced at last week’s spending review – will go towards the road crossing that will link Kent and Essex.
A new structures fund will also invest in repairing bridges, flyovers, tunnels and other transport infrastructure such as roads.
The Lower Thames crossing is aimed at reducing congestion on the Dartford Crossing, with a new motorway-style road.
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander has said that the project is “essential for improving the resilience of a key freight route and is critical to our long-term trade with Europe” and that it will “speed up the movement of goods from south-east England to the Midlands and the north, crucial to thousands of jobs and businesses”.
Tories claim hundreds of officials, police officers and councillors should be jailed over grooming gangs cover-up
Good morning. All governments have to perform U-turns from time to time and over the weekend Keir Starmer had to stage another, announcing that he would order a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. Although Starmer can argue that he never firmly ruled out an inquiry, and that he is just responding to a recommendation from a short, evidence-based audit of “our understanding of the scale, nature and drivers” of grooming gang abuse conducted by Louise Casey, this is still embarrassing because it is an obvious victory for Kemi Badenoch, Reform UK and Elon Musk (probably the prime mover in this) who were aggressively lobbying for a national inquiry in the new year. Badenoch is now saying Starmer should apologise for not agreeing with her more swiftly. As explained last week, when the opposition has to resort to demanding an apology, that is normally a sign of weakness, not strength, because it means it is running out of proper grievances to pursue. But this remains difficult territory for Labour. The No 10 press operation will be grateful that it has been quite low down the news agenda because of what is happening in the Middle East.
Here is Aletha Adu’s overnight story.
And here is an analysis by Peter Walker, who is with Starmer at the G7 in Canada and who explains how Starmer broke the news about the inquiry in a huddle with reporters on the plane crossing the Atlantic.
And here are the key developments this morning.
The NCA will work in partnership with police forces around the country and specialist officers from the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce, Operation Hydrant – which supports police forces to address all complex and high profile cases of child sexual abuse – and the Tackling Organised Exploitation Programme.
Their job will be to give victims of these horrific crimes, whose cases were not progressed through the criminal justice system, long-awaited justice and prevent more children from being hurt by these vile criminals.
This will build on action already taken by the government to see offenders locked up. Police have already reopened over 800 historic cases of group-based child sexual abuse since the home secretary asked them in January to look again at cases that were closed too early and victims denied justice.
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The Home Office is due to publish the Casey report into the grooming gangs. Casey was asked at the start of the year to “uncover the nature, scale and profile of group based CSEA [child sexual exploitation and abuse] offending”, to provide evidence about the ethnicity of offenders, and to consider “the cultural and societal drivers for this type of offending and the motivations and characteristics of grooming gang offending”.
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Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, has claimed that there could be hundreds of people who deserve to go to jail for covering up grooming gang abuse. In an interview with Sky News defending the need for an inquiry, Philp said:
What I’ve heard in the last few months, meeting retired police officers and meeting survivors, and what has really shocked me, has been the way that this was deliberately covered up over years and possibly decades.
It wasn’t that people were just negligent or just didn’t look into it properly. They deliberately and actively covered it up. I’m talking about senior police officers, local council leaders, social services, the Crown Prosecution Service.
And the reason they deliberately covered it up for years was because the victims were mainly very young white girls, often from troubled backgrounds, from care homes and so on, whereas the perpetrators were mainly of Pakistani heritage. And people in authority at the time were more concerned about so-called race relations than they were about protecting young girls …
There’s a criminal offence called misconduct in public office, and I think those people – and I’m not talking about handful, it is probably dozens or maybe hundreds of people in positions of authority over the years – deliberately covered this up. I think they are guilty of that criminal offence and frankly should be going to prison.
As an example, Philp cited evidence given by John Piekos, a former police office who says that, after he left the force and tried to get the police in West Yorkshire to investigate grooming at a children’s home in Bradford, he was told by a serving police officer and a council official to drop the
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, gives a speech promising a “national project of renewal”.
Morning: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor (who was also promising renewal in her spending review last week), is on a visit in the north-east of England, promoting plans to improve the road network/
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
After 3.30pm: David Lammy, the foreign secretary, and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, are due to make Commons statement, on the Israel/Iran conflict, and the inquiry into grooming gangs respectively. But we are not sure yet which is coming first, and, if the Speaker allows one or more urgent questions, they will come first.
Around 5pm (UK time): Keir Starmer is due to arrive at the G7 meeting in Canada.
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