Louise Casey’s review into child sexual exploitation carried out by grooming gangs has identified shortcomings across government agencies as part of the problem for a failure to tackle the issue more effectively over the past decade.
Former senior civil servant Casey’s report yesterday made a dozen recommendations for driving improvement, with clear calls for urgent action from the Home Office, the Department for Education and the Department for Transport.
Baroness Casey’s headline call – the creation of a new national inquiry into grooming-gang abuse – was backed by prime minister Keir Starmer over the weekend, ahead of the review’s publication.
Speaking in parliament yesterday, home secretary Yvette Cooper confirmed that the government will take action on all 12 of Casey’s recommendations “immediately”. The Home Office is the lead government department for tackling child sexual abuse and exploitation.
Cooper confirmed that the government’s response would include the launch a new national criminal operation into grooming gangs, overseen by the National Crime Agency. She said the move would bring together “all arms of the policing response” and develop a “rigorous new national operating model” that all forces can adopt, “ensuring grooming gangs are always treated as serious and organised crime”.
Casey, who is a former director general at the Home Office and the Department for Communities and Local Government, acknowledged her review was just the “latest in a long line” of investigations into child sexual exploitation over the past 16 years.
The review stated that while the landscape of policy and delivery responsibilities across government departments and statutory bodies is complex, “strong leadership, collaboration and grip has been lacking”.
“Reviews, recommendations and strategies on child sexual exploitation raise the same issues repeatedly: system failures in information sharing, the need for more training, understanding of risk factors of victims, and the importance of collecting better data and information on perpetrators, including on ethnicity,” the document says.
“The policy and delivery landscape for child sexual abuse and exploitation is spread across government departments and statutory bodies and therefore requires strong leadership, common purpose and above all a grip on the policy.
“But what emerges instead over at least the last decade is a repeating cycle: seminal moments of scandal and public outrage which lead to bursts of government focus and activity but no sustained improvement, leaving victims and the public with insufficient justice, action, accountability or answers.”
Abuse ‘massively underreported’
Casey’s review said that around 500,000 children a year are likely to experience child sexual abuse, but that the abuse is not identified in the vast majority of cases. It said police recorded crime data showed there were just over 100,000 offences of child sexual abuse and exploitation in 2024.
The review found there was an apparent anomaly between police recording of child sexual abuse, which is rising, and the identification of child sexual abuse and exploitation by local authority children’s services departments, which is falling.
Casey added that the ethnicity of perpetrators of child sexual exploitation is not recorded in two-thirds of cases. But the review noted that evidence from three police-force areas examined for the audit showed “disproportionate” numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation. It added that the pattern was borne out in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country.
Among her recommendations, Casey said the government should make it mandatory for the ethnicity and nationality data of all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases to be collected. “Policing should be held to account for its performance in collecting this data, including through the new police performance framework,” she added.
The DfE is the subject of more than one recommendation in the report. Casey said it should “move swiftly” to introduce unique reference numbers for children to help agencies share information about children at risk of child sexual abuse more effectively.
The report also called on DfE to “urgently interrogate” child-protection data to identify the causes of the decline in child sexual abuse and exploitation representation in local authority needs-assessment data.
Additionally, it said officials should probe the reasons for variations across local authorities; and review the effectiveness of Serious Incident Notifications in relation to child sexual abuse and exploitation. Councils are required to make a Serious Incident Notification to DfE when a child in their area dies or comes to serious harm and abuse is suspected.
Elsewhere, the report underscored the prevalence of taxi services in grooming-gang cases and called on DfT to tighten up rules on vetting for private-hire taxi drivers.
It said the department should bring in more rigorous statutory standards for local authority licensing and “put a stop” to drivers from outside of a local area being approved as taxi drivers.
“This remains an area that can be exploited by individuals and groups intent on sexually exploiting children and more rigorous approaches – and consistency in those approaches across local authorities – is necessary,” the report said.
Cooper says findings are ‘damning’
Speaking in parliament yesterday, the home secretary said Casey’s findings were “damning” and stated that DfE and DfT had agreed to progress key measures proposed.
“At its heart she identifies a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children,” Cooper said. “A continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation, and serious violence. And from the scars that last a lifetime.
“She finds too much fragmentation in the authorities’ response, too little sharing of information, too much reliance on flawed data, too much denial, too little justice, too many criminals getting off, too many victims being let down.”
Cooper told MPs that the reforms she was setting out represented “the strongest action any government has taken to tackle child sexual exploitation”.