Esther McVey
Main Page: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)Department Debates - View all Esther McVey's debates with the Home Office
Child Sexual Offender Data
Esther McVey Excerpts(1 week, 2 days ago)
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Esther McVey (Tatton) (Con)
It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Siobhain. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) for moving the motion, and I thank the many people who signed the petition, including 435 from my constituency, who helped to secure this important debate.
Although I welcome it, it is deeply disappointing that such a debate is needed. We are here only because of the outcry from the public, who are outraged that the Government and public institutions continue to shy away from questions of ethnicity, immigration status and religion. Baroness Casey’s “National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse” reported in June last year, and concluded that catastrophic systemic failures and institutional inaction had allowed grooming gangs to operate freely for many years. Recommendation 4 rightly stated that the Government should mandate
“the collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse”.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith
I just want to point out a clear example of why this is necessary. In 2022, the Home Office asked police forces to collect ethnicity and other data to have a display of evidence. Out of 43 forces, only one complied. That is why it must be statutory and enforced; does my right hon. Friend not agree?
Esther McVey
That is shameful. I am delighted that my right hon. Friend brought that up; that is why it is essential that today’s debate rectifies that situation.
Missing from Baroness Casey’s recommendations was the vital need for data collection on religion and immigration status—factors that surely need to be understood so that if they are found to be related to higher offending rates, strategies for protecting children can be that much more targeted and effective. As Baroness Casey acknowledges in her audit, for too long the authorities have shied away from the ethnicity of people involved, and “blindness”, “ignorance” and “prejudice” led to repeated failures, over decades, to properly investigate cases.
If we had complete and consistent data, we would be able to answer more questions with greater accuracy. Are certain types of exploitation increasing? How are offenders operating? Are those from certain ethnic backgrounds more likely than others to commit certain sorts of crimes? If we understand what patterns exist, we can improve policing, bring more survivors the justice they deserve and stop these horrendous crimes happening again.
Other questions need to be answered, too. Why are institutions so adverse to collecting and reporting such data? The Jay report, published in 2014, documented a reluctance to discuss offender ethnicity openly. We know that the Labour-run councils of Rotherham—
Sarah Champion
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for referring to the Jay report on Rotherham. She will be aware that the frontline staff were gathering that data; management and the upper echelons were blocking it. She is absolutely right to ask why that happened, and what the consequences were—I put it to her that there were not many.
Esther McVey
I thank the hon. Member for all her work on this matter over many years. I know the abuse that she went through for standing up for those girls.
Steve Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)
My point flows from the important case that my right hon. Friend is making and from what the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) said. A key element of transparency is finding patterns of behaviour in covering up the crimes. It is not only about patterns in offenders; we also need transparency about where crimes were covered up and the patterns in that.
Esther McVey
My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point; only then can we root out why people failed to investigate. Was it because of fear of being called racist, or even far right? Why were the cases not investigated? Was it because of a culture of political correctness that has been thriving in some Labour councils, such as in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and Oldham, and in other agencies, such as the police? They dodged the hard questions. Why? Because they were worried that it might reveal something that did not fit with their ideology of multiculturalism.
Shockingly, in her audit last year, Baroness Casey concluded that
“Questions about ethnicity have been…dodged for years.”
After a six-month wait, the Government responded to the Casey audit, accepting all the recommendations, but six months on from that, and a full year since the audit was published, here we are, still waiting for implementation. Will the Minister update us on that and let us know when we can expect the data to be published? Also, not only has the Government’s official inquiry into grooming gangs moved at a glacial pace, but one of their own—a Labour peer—has been appointed as its chair, and a former council chief executive and a chair of an NHS foundation trust have also been involved as panel members. That is exactly what the survivors expressly said they did not want to happen: the inquiry to be handed over to people from the very institutions under investigation.
Meanwhile, the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) has got on with the job, putting the Government to shame with his independent rape gang inquiry, which heard 10 days of evidence in February and which will report its findings next week. I would not say that I was “fortunate enough” to be part of that panel, but when asked to do so, I accepted. Quite honestly, what we were told was horrifying. There were horrendous stories of rape, but it was not just rape—although that is bad enough. Women were tortured—battered, strangled, cut, whipped—until they were close to death, and then brought back around to be raped again.
That happened over a sustained period because nobody wanted to believe what these women said when they reached out to the institutions that should have looked after them. Some were reaching out to children’s homes, which were paid thousands of pounds a year to look after them, but they were let down. Why? Because they were white, working-class girls, many of them vulnerable. People did not want to listen to them and would literally call them “white trash”, while allowing others whom they saw as elders in a community to be above reproach, and therefore did not investigate at all.
If we are to successfully end these appalling sexual crimes against children, we must fully understand what is happening, and to do that, we need the data. It is not racist to examine the ethnicity of these criminals; nor is it discriminatory to examine their immigration status. We must follow the evidence wherever it leads, no matter how uncomfortable the truth of it is. These awkward conversations must finally be had, and anyone who might be avoiding them because of a self-serving sense of political correctness must now decide to put the safety of children first. This is not a political football, a right-wing bandwagon or a dog-whistle issue. This is about life-altering suffering and abuse of the most shocking kind—suffering and abuse that could have been prevented. The survivors deserve to know the truth about the failings that were allowed to happen. I hope that all of us here today can agree that the only thing that really matters is protecting children, and that we must do everything to put them first.