Home Secretary names chair of Grooming Gangs Inquiry and publishes terms of reference

The Home Office has also published the draft terms of reference for the inquiry, which will be a series of local investigations overseen by a national panel with full statutory powers.

It will also be time-limited to three years and given a £65m budget.

Alongside Longfield, Zoë Billingham, who was formerly a lead inspector at HM Inspector of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, and Eleanor Kelly, former chief executive of Tower Hamlets and Southwark borough councils, will act as panellists.

According to the Government, the final terms of reference will be agreed with the Home Secretary and published by March 2026, when the inquiry will be formally established. 

The inquiry responds to recommendation 2 of Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, which called for a “time limited, targeted and proportionate inquiry” into cases of “failures or obstruction” by statutory services in relevant local areas.

The terms of reference state: “It will identify failures in practice and hold to account the individuals and institutions responsible for those failures. It should drive meaningful change in safeguarding systems at both local and national levels, ensuring that lessons are learned and that victims and survivors are placed at the centre of reform.”

On a local level, the terms of reference note that the objective of local investigations is to identify “failures in systems and procedures”, and failures by individual leaders in protecting children from grooming gangs within local areas.

In any local area, this may include examination of the actions of the following services or agencies (as determined by the Chair):

• local safeguarding partnerships (and their predecessors);
• community safety partnerships;
• regional safeguarding boards in Wales;
• local authorities (including children’s social work and family services);
• police forces;
• the wider criminal justice system (including the Crown Prosecution Service);
• health and sexual health services;
• education settings;
• youth and community services, including youth offending teams; and
• voluntary or third-sector organisations, such as victim support organisations.

According to the Home Office, the inquiry will develop a plan to decide which areas across England and Wales will be subject to local investigations.

Baroness Longfield has already confirmed that Oldham will be one of these investigations.

The inquiry will then publish findings and recommendations for each local area, which should be made publicly available.

The terms of reference state: “Before the conclusion of the three-year period, the Inquiry should synthesise the findings of the local investigations, and produce a final report that will comprise the national review. The final report should be submitted to the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary and subsequently published.

“Local and national recommendations should be informed by consultation with the authorities most likely to be charged with their implementation.”

In an oral statement to Parliament, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said: “The inquiry is focused, specifically, on child sexual abuse committed by grooming gangs.   

“It will consider, explicitly, the background of offenders – including their ethnicity and religion – and whether the authorities failed to properly investigate what happened out of a misplaced desire to protect community cohesion.   

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

Mahmood added: “What is required now is a moment of reckoning. We must cast fresh light on this darkness.”

In her statement she also set out steps the Government is taking to implement Baroness Casey’s recommendations.

These steps include the introduction of a legal duty for information sharing between safeguarding partners, and the creation of a unique identifier for each child, linking all data across government.   

Police technology will also be upgraded to ensure data can be shared across agencies.

The law will meanwhile be changed to make clear that children cannot consent when they have been raped by an adult, “so perpetrators are charged for the hideous crime they have committed”, Mahmood said.

In relation to taxi licencing, the Home Secretary added: “Abusers were applying for licences in areas where controls were lax, to circumvent protection put in place by local councils to tackle abuse.”

She added that the Transport Secretary “will soon be legislating to close this dangerous loophole” in the regulation of taxis.

Lottie Winson