Child Sexual Exploitation: Casey Report

Esther McVey Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right that so many victims and survivors do not come forward. We need to make it easier for people to do so, and recognise the scale of abuse. I agree with her on the really important issue about county lines and the interaction between criminal exploitation and sexual exploitation. Too often, the county lines and criminal exploitation is seen as an issue involving teenage boys, but very often teenage girls are also drawn in—and very often, that also means sexual exploitation. I do not believe that enough investigation has yet been done into that particular pattern and form of child sexual abuse and exploitation. As we strengthen the law on the criminal exploitation of children, we need to ensure that this issue is properly pursued, as she says, as part of the data gathering and through further research.

[Esther McVey (Tatton) (Con)]

This Government have been dragged kicking and screaming to deliver a national inquiry, having dismissed the pleas of the nation as jumping on a far-right bandwagon. That reluctance is why my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) will continue his inquiry and why I will be supporting him it. Will the Government’s inquiry investigate the political motivations behind the cover-ups, including the role of the Labour party, or will that continue to be swept under the carpet?

[Yvette Cooper]

Everyone should want not just to get to the truth about past failures, but to ensure we make the changes to protect children for the future. That includes changes in social services; changes in policing and the police operation, which I hope the right hon. Lady would welcome, to take action to put perpetrators behind bars; and action to gather proper ethnicity data, which simply has not been gathered properly before. Louise Casey’s report is very clear: the data gathering that the right hon. Lady’s Government left behind is totally inadequate. I hope she will agree to all those factors being extremely important, so that we can get stronger protection, and truth, for victims.