Keir Starmer will launch a national inquiry into grooming gangs after receiving the recommendations of an independent report on the scandal.
The prime minister said a new statutory inquiry was “the right thing to do” based on the findings submitted by Louise Casey, who has carried out a months-long inquiry into the abuse of young girls.
Speaking to reporters travelling with him to the G7 summit in Canada, Starmer said Casey recommended “a national inquiry on the basis of what she has seen”.
“I have read every single word of her report and I am going to accept her recommendation. That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she has put in her audit,” he said. “I shall now implement her recommendations.”
Asked to set out a timeline for the inquiry, Starmer said: “It will be statutory under the Inquiries Act. That will take a bit of time to sort out exactly how that works, and we will set that out in an orderly way.”
Starmer has previously resisted pressure for a new national inquiry into grooming gangs, and said earlier this year it would delay justice for victims. He called for ministers to instead focus on implementing the recommendations of previous reviews.
Casey was asked to carry out a three-month national review on the scale and extent of grooming gangs in January after producing a report into sexual abuse in Rotherham.
She was tasked with examining data not available to the initial national inquiry led by Alexis Jay, and to look into the ethnicity and demographics of abusers and victims, as well as “the cultural and societal drivers for this type of offending, including among different ethnic groups”.
Starmer said on Saturday that Casey’s “position when she started the audit was that there was not a real need for a national inquiry”, but that she had changed her mind after reviewing the evidence.
In parallel to Casey’s review, the government asked Tom Crowther KC, who led an investigation in Telford, to help devise a model for a series of similar investigations in five towns where girls were abused, including Oldham.
Ministers came under pressure over grooming gangs last year after Elon Musk spotlighted the government’s decision to refuse Oldham council’s request for a second national inquiry. The US billionaire’s flurry of tweets on the subject brought the scandal back into public consciousness.
On Friday, seven men who groomed two vulnerable teenage girls in Rochdale were found guilty of multiple sex offences after a long-running trial. The court heard the men subjected the girls to years of misery and expected them to have sex with them “whenever and wherever they wanted”.
Casey’s 2015 review into the scandal in Rotherham said there had been an “archaic culture of sexism, bullying and discomfort around race”, with councillors and staff fearing being labelled racist if they mentioned the ethnicity of perpetrators.
In response to the announcement of a new national inquiry, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative party leader, said: “Keir Starmer doesn’t know what he thinks unless an official report has told him so … I’ve been repeatedly calling for a full national inquiry since January. It’s about time he recognised he made a mistake and apologise for six wasted months.”