IN 2022, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse concluded: “Finally, the result of this lack of accurate and reliable data from police forces and local authorities, compounded by the lack of consistency about the definitions of ‘child sexual exploitation’ and ‘networks’ is that the government and other organisations cannot know the current scale of child sexual exploitation by networks, or who is involved in these groups.”

Three years down the line, and Baroness Casey, the members of her 27-strong team and the government still don’t know.

The most defining feature of the recently published National Audit on Group Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse is not what it says, but what it does not explain. 

According to the audit, group-based child sexual exploitation accounts for 3.5 per cent of all child sexual abuse in Britain. 

We are about to spend untold millions on a national inquiry and criminal operation to root out group-based CSE, holding failing institutions to account, while specialist support services for victims of CSE have been closing at a faster rate than other support services. 

Why? Because the Asian sex gang is weaponised by Elon Musk, the Tories, Faragists and the far right, putting pressure on the newly elected Labour government struggling under a tsunami of misinformation, often promoted by warring politicians.

Calling the storm and fury surrounding this most serious of crimes a moral panic or accusing politicians of exploiting the suffering of victims does not suggest that child sexual exploitation does not exist, that it is not a genuine and significant issue, or that Asian men are over-represented in trial data, or as suspects in West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire or the Greater Manchester area. 

It does not mean that this kind of abuse is not perpetrated by predominantly one ethnicity or another, or that it is not of industrial scale and devastating consequences.

But what is happening across the political divide and in government since Musk catapulted Britain’s grooming gangs onto the world’s stage a decade after the Rotherham scandal is embittered political outrage in service of another agenda entirely.

Casey’s timeline in her report inexplicably opens in 2009, nearly a decade after the existence of grooming gangs was acknowledged.

She claims that this is the date that the first official definition of child sexual exploitation was adopted by government, but the term had been in circulation since the early 2000s, with agencies finding evidence of grooming gangs all over the country from 2000 onwards.

This kind of group-based child sexual exploitation is not new, but what is different is the most emotive of factors — ethnicity. Casey’s report was designed to draw a line in the sand and silence the far-right alliance. 

The report discusses failings that have occurred in graphic detail but these are devoid of context, written in the language of Whitehall, a selective account presented with absolute authority, its tone judicial, accusatory and blaming, with a heavy emphasis on punitive justice, urging the government to convict, convict, convict — not just the perpetrators but the failing institutions, professionals and politicians who allegedly covered this up.

There is anger, frustration and outrage spewed across its pages, but few answers to the question of how or why the Cabinet Office, the Home Office or other government departments failed the victims and their families. 

Casey has police forces, councils, social workers and professionals in her sights, not successive governments who slashed budgets and decimated public services. 

Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner, gave a dramatic and exaggerated response to the national audit, saying that “The girls at the heart of this scandal have been failed by every professional in their lives.” 

Casey’s report was intended to “draw a line in the sand” on the question of the ethnicity of the perpetrators, troubling the government at every turn.

But her damning report was unable to build a robust national picture of the demographics of perpetrators or the true scale of these crimes. Why? Because the data doesn’t exist.

The Home Secretary said: “Baroness Casey’s audit confirms that ethnicity data is not recorded for two-thirds of grooming gang perpetrators, and that the data is not good enough to support any statements about the ethnicity of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders at the national level,” and while that is the truth, that wouldn’t satisfy the far-right alliance. 

Instead, Casey fell back upon data reported by three police forces — West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester — concluding that this inadequate data showed a disproportionate over-representation of people of Asian ethnic background.

West Yorkshire Police reported data in May 2025 in response to a freedom of information (FOI) request. This stated that between 2020-24 that there were 1,437 crimes of child sexual exploitation recorded, but that West Yorkshire Police were unable to establish if these were individual or group-based without manually trawling the data. 

Casey’s report was submitted to the government two weeks ago, and therefore, it would have been expected that West Yorkshire would have been able to supply the data requested by the FOI. 

Further FOI requests on ethnicity of suspects related to crimes of sexual violence against children such as rape of a child under 16, showed further discrepancies with Casey’s data as to the number of suspects identified within the 2020-24 period.

West Yorkshire Police qualified their response to these FOI requests, saying: “Please note that police forces do not use generic systems or identical procedures for capturing the data. For these reasons, this response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with responses you may receive from other police forces,” suggesting that any data obtained from the three forces targeted by Casey could not and should not have been comparable.

The issues with data capture, retention and analysis were not a revelation to British police forces. The Home Office manages two police information and communication technology systems: the Police National Computer and the Police National Database. The Home Office has been aware of the Police National Database flaws and limitations for over a decade. There has been repeated deferral of investment in the new technological infrastructure.

The current system only ensures service continuity until 2026. In 2024, the Home Office had been advised that it will need replacing entirely within the next three to five years. In 2005, the government accepted recommendations that changes should be made to the Police National Computer so that ethnicity was better recorded. These changes were planned to be introduced, but not until 2023.

In 2014, the Rotherham scandal highlighted again the inability of police forces to share and access data. In 2016, senior ranking officers in West and South Yorkshire Police forces told the Morning Star: “They are taking information from different systems still. What we need ultimately is a system where all the big partners are talking to each other on the same system.”

By 2018, it was realised that the programme of replacement would not deliver as originally planned, and costs had spiralled. In 2024, the National Audit Office warned that the Home Office has not prioritised the funding of the replacement system, and those police had lost confidence in the troubled replacement programme, which is projected to cost over £1 billion upon completion. 

There have been significant data losses affecting 112,697 person records, where the ageing technology hindered and obstructed any retrieval. But Casey didn’t raise these pressing issues with the home affairs select committee when asked if a new data collection system was needed to address the failings that had occurred. 

Sarah Kincaid, adviser to the Home Office, claimed that a new IT system was not required. Casey remarked that Kincaid was “absolutely right” and said that she didn’t want to give organisations the excuse that they couldn’t collect the data, even though the PND system has been unwieldy, difficult to use and regarded as unfit for purpose by many police officers for years. 

Did Labour press the nuclear button on grooming gangs simply to diffuse the pressure from the far-right alliance?

The Lammy Review, published in 2017, showed that black, Asian and minority ethnic people are treated in a discriminatory way by the criminal justice system and highlighted the limitations of police IT systems, which have contributed to the failure to gather enough data, creating inaccurate “problem profiles.” 

In 2022, it was reported by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse that police forces were excluding networks from group-based CSE suspects who did not have any record of other criminality. As such, these groups were not targeted for investigation. 

As most convicted Asian grooming gangs are also involved in organised crime, the risk of distortion is clear. More importantly, the capacity for harm and institutional failing increases as a direct consequence of the incomplete and flawed data recorded by an aged and outdated national database, which excludes networks that don’t fit the flawed “problem profiles.”

When the flawed data Casey obtained is scrutinised, there is a danger that the line in the sand may be washed away. But it did the job. The far-right alliance can’t continue to demand a public inquiry. The government can’t be accused of covering up the ethnicity of suspected perpetrators 

The Conservative opposition is on the back foot, faced with an investigation into their significant failings in government. The government has accepted all 12 of Casey’s recommendations and will now hold a national inquiry. It should have been a watershed moment for the victims, survivors and campaigners who have been fighting for an investigation with statutory powers for decades.

Paul Taylor of the home affairs select committee described the failings that have occurred “as a systemic failure in the body politic at every level” and asked Casey: “Are we talking about failures at every level of government?” The question is rhetorical, and the answer is yes. 

But what is the home affairs select committee going to do about it, given their apparent level of ignorance of the problems within that department, besetting any attempt to form robust policy and practice to protect children from this type of crime? Casey found that there wasn’t a single police force or local authority which had an accurate understanding of the networks sexually exploiting children in their area. 

The grooming gang scandal caused a landslide in Westminster. What we are seeing now is a search-and-rescue operation, to apportion blame onto police officers, social workers, councils, but not government. It’s not justice, that’s retribution.

Yet justice is exactly what Casey claims her proposals for a three-year national inquiry and concurrent national criminal investigation will deliver. But who for? But the real question is — whose interests has the national audit ultimately served? And at what cost to the victims, survivors, families and communities who need action, not words, now.