PM under ‘immense’ pressure over grooming gangs inquiry, says Farage

The Prime Minister is under “immense” pressure to call a national inquiry into grooming gangs, Nigel Farage has said as he reiterated his demand for a new review.

Comparing previous inquiries to a “shotgun approach”, the Reform UK leader told his party’s north-west regional conference on Saturday that a new inquiry needed to be a “rifle shot” dealing with gangs “predominantly of Pakistani origin” preying on “young, in most-cases working-class white girls”.

He said: “Unless we get to the bottom of what has happened here, to understand the full extent and scale of what has happened here, to understand the motives of those who perpetrated these crimes – which frankly I believe are more than likely to be deeply racist in nature – unless we confront this head on, we are never going to have a path to stopping it.”

Pressure

Mr Farage added that he welcomed Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham’s decision to “break ranks” and call for an inquiry, saying: “I think the pressure on the Prime Minister is becoming immense.”

Mr Farage made his remarks after an introduction by Elizabeth Harper, a survivor of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, who also called for an inquiry.

Insisting that a new inquiry should be completed within nine months, he reiterated his pledge that Reform would establish its own review if the Government did not act by the end of January.

His speech comes a day after the director of the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s Hydrant programme targeting sexual abuse said there was no “significant issue” with “any particular ethnicity or setting”.

Richard Fewkes said data released on Friday “reflects what you would expect to see across the country” and people involved in grooming gangs were “predominantly white”.

New figures from the police database show that, where ethnicity data was available, 85% of “group-based” child abusers were white in the first three quarters of 2024.

The numbers

The same data for the whole of 2023 showed 83% of offenders were white.

Earlier on Saturday, Health Secretary Wes Streeting warned that “irresponsible and coarse public discourse” on the issue could lead to violence against Muslims in general.

Pointing to the attack on a mosque in New Zealand in 2019, where the killer had written “For Rotherham” on one of his weapons, Mr Streeting told The Guardian: “There are people in my community who have either Pakistani heritage or look different, who are now more fearful today than they were before.”

Criticising the “well-meaning, but ultimately fundamentally misguided and warped views of political correctness” of police and councils who had let down thousands of victims, he added: “We have to be extremely clear about the failings and the nature of it, and not allow political correctness, fear of stating the truth as it is to fail victims, as has happened before.

“We must also make sure that entire communities are not tarred with the same brush.”

Response

On Monday, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the Government would begin to implement Professor Alexis Jay’s call for mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse, with further details expected to be set out in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, polling by More in Common suggested most people thought the Government had not done enough to tackle grooming gangs.

Some 60% of people told the pollster that the current Labour Government had not done enough, while 69% said the same about the previous Conservative administration.

More than half of the 2,011 people surveyed said they had no or not much confidence that the justice system took allegations of child sexual exploitation seriously, while 41% thought the activities of grooming gangs had been deliberately covered up.