Government told Bradford grooming scandal could dwarf Rotherham

SAFEGUARDING Minister Jess Phillips has been warned that the grooming gang crisis across Keighley and the Bradford District, could dwarf the Rotherham scandal, with a leading child abuse lawyer and a local MP urging the Home Office to act.

Meeting with the Safeguarding Minister and Home Office officials on Wednesday (14th May), solicitor David Greenwood and Keighley and Ilkley’s MP Robbie Moore presented Home Office officials with an explosive new dossier warning that more than 72,000[1] children may have been at risk of child sexual exploitation (CSE) across the Bradford District between 1996 and the present day.

The dossier outlines years of systematic failures by Bradford Council and partner agencies, alongside disturbing first-hand accounts from survivors, police records, and court proceedings, setting out the case for a full independent inquiry into grooming gangs across the Bradford District —one that campaigners and survivors say is long overdue.

Despite growing calls for an inquiry in Bradford, political leaders across the Bradford District, including Council leader Susan Hinchcliffe, Mayor of West Yorkshire Tracy Brabin and Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime Alison Lowe, have repeatedly rejected calls for an inquiry, most recently in April 2025.

Greenwood and Moore argue that these refusals mirror the same patterns of denial and deflection seen in towns like Rotherham and Telford, where decades of abuse were hidden in plain sight until independent inquiries finally forced the truth into the open.

The warning to Government comes ahead of a crucial decision expected later this year on which areas will be selected for targeted grooming gang inquiries, alongside the publication of a rapid audit on the crisis commissioned by the Home Secretary and led by Baroness Louise Casey.

The pair say the case of Bradford highlights a fundamental flaw in the Government’s current approach to tackling grooming gangs—an approach that allows local authorities and political leaders to veto inquiries into their own safeguarding failures.

Moore and Greenwood warn that this model is allowing councils to evade scrutiny, even in areas with widespread and credible evidence of abuse.

They are urging the Home Office to intervene directly if leaders in Bradford continue to reject calls for a full inquiry.

Speaking after the meeting, Robbie Moore MP said:

“As we made clear to the Minister today, there is an overwhelming case for a full inquiry across the Bradford District, yet we have shockingly never had one. To make matters worse, senior leaders in Bradford Council and across the West Yorkshire mayoralty continue to reject these calls.

This shows that the Government’s current strategy is fundamentally flawed. It allows local inquiries to be voluntary and therefore hands the power to refuse these inquiries to the very authorities that victims say failed to protect them in the first place.

My message to the Safeguarding Minister was simple. If Bradford’s political leadership will not act, then the Government must. And if the current system prevents that from happening, it is the system that must be overruled, not the victims who want this inquiry. This should not be about politics. This should be about the protection of children in the here and now and securing justice for those who were failed over the past two decades.”

Solicitor David Greenwood, who played a key role in exposing abuse in Rotherham, said:

“We know from official statistics that around 72,000 girls have been affected by these offences since 1996 in the Bradford council area. The public will never understand the true scale and types of exploitation or the positive and negative responses of the council, police and NHS in Bradford until and extensive review similar to that conducted by Professor Alexis Jay in Rotherham is carried out.

As one woman I’m representing told me last night ‘It could encourage others to come forward and aid in the healing process, especially for those who aren’t strong enough. The thousands of girls, now women, in Bradford and Keighley need this. The authorities owe it to us’”