SHADOW Home Secretary Chris Philp has defended the Conservatives’ record on tackling child sex grooming gangs and denied that the previous administration failed to tackle the issue.
Asked why Labour is now taking more action than the Tories did, he told GB News: “I don’t think that’s true. I mean, of course, it was the Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May who set up the original Rotherham inquiry.
“Theresa May also set up the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, which touched on this, amongst other things. It was Sajid Javid, a Conservative Home Secretary who started collecting ethnicity data.
“It was Rishi Sunak, a Conservative Prime Minister, who set up the grooming gangs task force, which in its first year led to 550 arrests. So that’s what the last government did.”
On why the Conservatives did not set up a national inquiry, he said: “Oldham Council requested a national inquiry into grooming gangs in July of last year, just after the election, the Labour government contemptuously dismissed their request and that request then became public in early January.
“I’d become shadow Home Secretary just a few weeks before that, and when that became public, we strongly, Kemi Badenoch and I very strongly and very publicly supported Oldham Council’s request for a proper national inquiry into this…
“And I’ve spoken to retired police officers, and I’ve retired, talked to survivors sitting there in the last six months who have explained how this was deliberately covered up by police, by local authorities, by social services.”
He added: “This does need to be a quick inquiry. Some public inquiries drag on for five or ten years. We can’t have that happening here. This needs to be a one or two year process, a very focused process.
“I think the work on prosecutions for misconduct in public office should happen alongside the inquiry, not afterwards. We know from Charlie Peters’ work, there are about 50 towns affected. All of those need to be covered.
“The inquiry needs to have the legal power to compel the production of evidence and compel participation, because as recently as last year, we saw public bodies still withholding evidence, for example, from the Greater Manchester local inquiry.
“The chairs of that resigned last year because they didn’t have those legal powers. Bradford City Council is even to this day, refusing to have an inquiry. Bradford City Council is still trying to cover this up, so it’s got to have the powers to get underneath that and compel the production of evidence.
“It’s got to be quick. We can’t have this dragging on for years and years and nor can it delay prosecutions either.”
