Cooper says law on rape being tightened so adults cannot use consent as defence against charge of raping child under 16 – UK politics live | Politics

John Cryer, a former Labour MP who is now in the Lords, has just told Radio 4’s PM programme that when his mother, Ann Cryer, MP for Keighley from 1997 to 2010, first raised concerns about Asian men sexually abusing young women in Yorkshire about 20 years ago, fellow Labour party members tried to get her expelled from the party claiming she was racist. He said people who covered up abuse of this kind should now be prosecuted.

Why was Kemi Badenoch so keen to call for a national inquiry into grooming gangs in January? She may well have been persuaded by the merits of the arguments in favour. But the fact that this was popular with the public could have been a factor too.

In January 76% of Britons were in favour of a national inquiry, according to YouGov. YouGov says that figure has now gone up to 87%.

Lawyers who have represented the victims of grooming gangs have welcomed the news that a national inquiry is happening – while questioning some of the details.

Richard Scorer, head of abuse law and inquiries at Slater and Gordon, said:

We welcome the announcement of a national investigation with statutory powers and the integration of local inquiries. However, critical questions remain unanswered. Is this truly a full public inquiry, or merely a ‘commission’, as the home secretary described? The distinction matters deeply for victims, survivors, and the public.

We also support the involvement of the National Crime Agency (NCA), but this must be backed by substantial new funding. Current police investigations into grooming gangs are painfully slow, and without significant additional resources, justice will continue to be delayed and denied.

And Amy Clowrey, a solicitor from the firm Switalskis, said:

Our clients have been denied accountability for the failures by councils and police for many years.

We hope local inquiries will drill into the detail of failures at a local level and that what is learnt from those inquiries is used in the central national inquiry to better protect future generations of children.

At the same time, we want to see the IICSA (Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse) recommendations implemented in full, right now. Those recommendations must not be shelved.

In the Commons, Labour’s Gurinder Singh Josan asked for an assurance that the police would collect better data about the ethnicity of victims too. He said:

The secretary of state will be aware that there’s been historic allegations involving the grooming and sexual abuse of Sikh girls. So will she ensure that the requirement to collect ethnicity and nationality data extends to victims, so that we can once and for all, see the evidence for any model of this kind that exists?

And Yvette Cooper replied:

He raises a very important issue about victims, and very often victims in many communities he’s talked about, Sikh girls, not feeling confident to come forward and feeling the sense of shame that prevents young people being able to ask for help when they need it.

It’s essential therefore, that we strengthen the ethnicity data around victims as well as around perpetrators to make sure that victims and survivors in all communities get the support and safeguarding they need.

Kemi Badenoch asked Yvette Cooper when Louise Casey submitted her report to Downing Street, and whether it was changed before it was published. She did not get a reply.

The Conservative MP Sarah Bool asked Cooper the same questions a few minutes ago. Cooper said the report was submitted to government 10 days ago. And she said anyone who thought Louise Casey could be pressurised into changing her mind clearly had not met her.

In the Commons Robbie Moore (Con) claimed that council leaders in areas like Keighley and the wider Bradford area had been allowed to just say no to an inquiry.

In response, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said the safeguarding minister Jess Phillips had previously said she “would not allow local councils to be able to turn their backs and to say ‘no’ to investigations where they are needed”.

Cooper went: “That is why we have accepted Baroness Casey’s recommendation for a national inquiry that will underpin those local investigations.”

In the Commons Richard Tice, the Reform UK deputy leader, asked Cooper to apologise to people who called for a national inquiry. He alleged they had been smeared by Keir Starmer. (See 12.41pm.)

He also asked if the inquiry would conclude within two years.

Cooper said that the inquiry is expected to take around three years. But it might be able to conclude before then, she said.

As for an apology, she said huge harm had been done to victims. She said the Casey report set out how they were failed over many years. They deserved an apology for that, she said (from the Tories, she implied.)

Here are some extracts from Louise Casey’s audit of the grooming gangs scandal.

On what group-based child sexual exploitation actually involves

Group-based child sexual exploitation’, rare though it may be, is one of the most heinous crimes in our society.

That term ‘group-based child sexual exploitation’ is actually a sanitised version of what it is. I want to set it out in unsanitised terms: we are talking about multiple sexual assaults committed against children by multiple men on multiple occasions; beatings and gang rapes. Girls having to have abortions, contracting sexually transmitted infections, having children removed from them at birth.

When those same girls get older, they face long-term physical and mental health impacts. Sometimes they have criminal convictions for actions they took while under coercion. They have to live with fear and the constant shadow over them of an injustice which has never been righted – the shame of not being believed. And, with a criminal justice system that can re-traumatise them all over again, often over many years. With an overall system that compounds and exacerbates the damage; rarely acknowledges its failures to victims. They never get to see those people who were in positions of power and let them down be held accountable.

On the failure to proper collect ethnicity data

The appalling lack of data on ethnicity in crime recording alone is a major failing over the last decade or more. Questions about ethnicity have been asked but dodged for years. Child sexual exploitation is horrendous whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination.

Instead of examination, we have seen obfuscation. 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. This does no one any favours at all, and least of all those in the Asian, Pakistani or Muslim communities who needlessly suffer as those with malicious intent use this obfuscation to sow and spread hatred.

On what the available data does show

We found that the ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data.

Despite the lack of a full picture in the national datasets, there is enough evidence available in local police data in three police force areas which we examined which show disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination.

On what the rape law should be tightened

Despite the age of consent being 16, we have found too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to15 year-old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.

This is due to a ‘grey area’ in the law where, although any sexual activity with 13–15- year-olds is unlawful, the decision on whether to charge, and which offence to charge with, is left more open to interpretation.

The purpose is largely aimed at avoiding criminalising someone who reasonably believed a child was older than they were or criminalising relationships between teenagers. But in practice, this nuance in law is being used to the benefit of much older men who had groomed underage children for sex.

The law should be changed so adult men who groom and have sex with 13–15-yearolds received mandatory charges of rape, mirroring the approach taken in countries like France.

On how a national inquiry should be set up, ‘coordinating a series of targeted local investigations’

Based on findings from the criminal investigation above, and submissions from victims and witnesses, an Independent Commission should review cases of failures or obstruction by statutory services to identify localities where local investigations should be instigated.

There would need to be a process to identify instances and allegations of statutory agencies’ failures, and we recommend that the government develops a list of criteria to determine the types and extent of failures which should be used to assess the triggering of a hearing.

The Independent Commission would set strict timescales and terms of reference for the local investigations which would have a single appointed legal team, with full statutory powers available to them, able to compel witnesses where they refuse to cooperate. Each investigation will call witnesses to give evidence and will require records to be submitted. Local authorities, police forces and other relevant agencies should in the meantime be required not to destroy any relevant records.

Back in the Commons Josh Barbardine, a Lib Dem justice spokesperson, also criticised Kemi Badenoch for the tone of her comments. (See 4.20pm and 4.24pm.) He said he felt “really let down and disgusted” by what she said. He went on: “Victims and survivors deserve more than a smug, I-told-you-so diatribe.”

The Home Office has published the 197-page text of Louise Casey’s report, National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.

Paul Waugh, the Labour MP for Rochdale, told MPs that he was felt a “cold fury” listening to what Badenoch said. He said that much of what she said about Labour’s record was “beneath contempt”. And he praised Cooper for appointing the “fiercely independent” Louise Casey to produce this report.

Unusually, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, responded to Cooper, not her Tory shadow, Chris Philp. This is a measure of the importance Badenoch attaches to the issue. Calling for a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal has been one of her main campaign arguments in recent months.

Badenoch claimed that the government was only setting up an inquiry because of the opposition. She said:

I couldn’t believe my ears listening to the home secretary’s statement as if this was their plan all along, when we all know it is another U-turn after months of pressure. The prime minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory National Inquiry into the grooming gangs.

Cooper responded by saying that the Casey report sets out “a timeline of failure” by the previous government. For more than a decade, even when evidence of the problem was available, the last government did nothing about the issues being addressed today, including while Badenoch was minister for children.

UPDATE: Badenoch said:

The prime minister has waited months for someone to take this decision for him. This is the kind of dithering and delay that the survivors complained about.

We need answers to the following questions. The house deserves to know, what changed the prime minister’s mind, from thinking this was dog whistle far-right politics, to something he must do?

And Cooper replied:

I don’t think she can have read this report and the seriousness of its conclusions, because it sets out a timeline of failure from 2009 to 2025.

Repeated reports and recommendations that were not acted on, on child protection, on police investigations, on ethnicity data, on data sharing, on support for victims. For 14 of those 16 years, her party was in government, including years when she was the minister for children and families, then the minister for equalities, covering race and ethnicity issues and violence against women and girls, and I did not hear her raise any of these issues until January of this year.

She will know the prime minister didn’t just raise them. He acted on them, bringing the first prosecutions against grooming gangs, calling for action to address ethnicity issues in 2012. [See 2.35pm.]

I am sorry that she chose not to join in the apology to victims and survivors for decades of failure, that was a cross-party apology in 2022 and it should be again if she really had victims interests and the national interest at heart.

Cooper said the Casey report said police forces were not collecting proper information about the ethnicity of offenders. That was “ridiculous”, she said.

“Frankly, it is ridiculous and helps no one that this basic information is not collected, especially when there have been warnings and recommendations stretching back 13 years.”

Cooper said she had already told police forces to change their recording practices, and the quality of the data is improving.

Baroness Casey’s audit examined local level data in three police force areas – Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire – where high profile cases involving Pakistani heritage men have long been investigated and reported, and there they found the suspects of group-based child sexual offences were disproportionately likely to be Asian men.

She also found indications of disproportionality in serious case reviews.

While much more robust national data is needed, we cannot and must not shy away from these findings because, as Baroness Casey says, ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities.

The vast majority of people in our British, Asian and Pakistani heritage communities continue to be appalled by these terrible crimes and agree that the criminal minority of sick predators and perpetrators in every community must be dealt with robustly by the criminal law.

Cooper said Casey found cases where suspects were asylum seekers.

She went on:

Let me make clear – those who groom children or who commit sexual offences will not be granted asylum in the UK. We will do everything in our power to remove them.

I do not believe the law is strong enough that we have inherited so we are bringing forward a change to the law so that anyone convicted of sexual offences is excluded from the asylum system and denied refugee status.

Cooper said that the government would also implement Casey’s recommendations relating to mandatory information sharing by agencies.

And she said the government would toughen licensing laws for taxis, which have been implicated in many of the scandals.

Cooper says she has accepted Casey’s call for a national commission, with statutory inquiry powers, to oversee the local inquiries into grooming gangs that are already taking place.

But she says Casey is “not recommending another overarching inquiry of the kind conducted by Prof Alexis Jay”, she says.

The inquiry should be time-limited, she says.

Further details of the inquiry will be set out in due course, she says.

Cooper says the Casey report makes 12 recommendations, and the government will act on all of them, she says.

In line with the first recommendation, the government will tighten the law on rape, she says.

Baroness Casey’s first recommendation is we must see children as children. She concludes too many grooming gang cases have been dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges because a 13 to 15 year old is perceived to have been in love with or had consented to sex with the perpetrator.

So we will change the law to ensure that adults who engage in penetrative sex with a child under 16 face the most serious charge of rape, and we will work closely with the CPS and the police to ensure there are safeguards for consensual teenage relationships.

We will change the law so that those convicted for child prostitution offences while their rapists got off scot-free, will have their convictions disregarded and their criminal records expunged.

Cooper goes on:

The audit describes victims as young as 10, often those in care or children with learning or physical disabilities being singled out for grooming precisely because of their vulnerability, perpetrators still walking free because no one joined the dots, or because the law ended up protecting them instead of the victims that they had exploited, deep rooted institutional failures stretching back decades where organisations who should have protected children and punished offenders looked the other way.

She says Louise Casey said “blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions all played a part in this collective failure”.

And, on ethnicity, she says:

[Casey] has found continued failure to gather proper, robust national data, despite concerns being raised going back very many years.

In the local data that the audit examined from three police forces, they identified clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men, and she refers to examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions.

Cooper goes on:

These findings are deeply disturbing, but most disturbing of all, as Baroness Casey makes clear, is the fact that too many of these findings are not new.

As Baroness Casey’s audit sets out, there have been 15 years of reports, reviews, inquiries and investigations into these appalling rapes, exploitation and violent crimes against children, detailed over 17 pages in her report.