Officials must be ‘held to account’ on grooming gangs

Following last week’s reports on the failures of local authorities and police to tackle child sexual exploitation in Greater Manchester, Lord Pearson of Rannoch has asked the UK Attorney General whether any council officials had ever been prosecuted as a result of their failure to address the issue.

His written question read:

“To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many council officials have been (1) charged with, (2) convicted for, and (3) are awaiting trial for, dereliction of duty for failure to support victims of grooming gangs since 1997.”

The question points to the issue raised by Tim Dieppe, that thousands of girls across the country are being systematically abused as police and others fail to address child sexual exploitation that they are already aware of.

Lord Keen of Elie responded to the written question, stating:

“The CPS does not maintain a central record of defendants’ occupations, nor of the specific circumstances under which a person has been charged with an offence. This information could only be obtained by an examination of CPS case files, which would incur disproportionate cost. The CPS collects data to assist the management of its prosecution functions. The CPS does not collect data that constitutes official statistics as defined in the Statistics and Registration Act 2007.”

Tim Dieppe commented:

“There is now abundant evidence that many council and local authority employees and police knew about this abuse but failed to protect young children from systematic abuse. These people need to be held to account so that lessons can be learned to prevent this from continuing. The government’s answer shows that so far there is no central effort to address this, and meanwhile, more girls continue to be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.”