The Independent Statutory Inquiry into Grooming Gangs has today published its Terms of Reference.
The Inquiry will have full legal powers to compel witnesses to give evidence and require local councils to hand over documents, it has been revealed.
Under the terms of reference, local councils will not be allowed to investigate themselves and all evidence of possible criminal conduct by local leaders or professionals will be referred to the police.
The inquiry will also directly examine whether the ethnicity, culture, or religion of victims or their abusers were a causal link in the crime.
The full terms of reference can be read here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-inquiry-into-grooming-gangs-terms-of-reference/terms-of-reference
Responding to the terms of reference, Keighley and Ilkley Robbie Moore MP said:
"There are major steps forward for survivors in today's terms of reference, but also much to be worried about.
First, the Inquiry will now directly examine how ethnicity, culture, or religion of either perpetrators or victims played a role in the crime itself. The draft terms of reference wanted to examine how ethnicity & religion affected the institutional response to grooming gangs - rather than the crime itself. This change is therefore welcome news for survivors and campaigners.
Second, the inquiry team themselves have also explicitly recognised that ethnicity and religion is a question “that previous reviews chose not to address”. This is a fact the Prime Minister, government Ministers and many Labour MPs failed to acknowledge when they opposed the need for a national inquiry before the Casey Review in June last year, choosing to hide behind previous reviews.
Third, the inquiry will formally refer any evidence of criminal conduct by professionals directly to the police. This is a significant development. The draft terms of reference said it would make “referrals to relevant professional bodies” if failures were found - this clearly did not go far enough. We need to see those who have criminally covered this up behind bars.
Fourth, the Chair will release findings of the inquiry on a rolling basis rather than forcing survivors to wait for one long report in 2029. Again, this is good for transparency. Periodic reporting ensures the inquiry doesn’t quietly disappear for three years.
That said, this is effectively a further three-month delay to the inquiry and we still do not know if Keighley & Bradford will be specifically investigated.
The Inquiry team say they need another three months to create a “framework” which will help them to select specific areas to be investigated, alongside Oldham. In reality, that means local investigations won’t begin until at least a year after the inquiry was first promised, which is causing a huge amount of anxiety for survivors who want this inquiry started now.
Many of us expected local areas to be announced alongside Oldham this week. Instead, we are being told to wait another three months just to come up with another framework.Every delay is reducing the time this inquiry has to do its job before the 2029 deadline.
The biggest unknown, in my view, is the “framework” for triggering local investigations itself.
We already know that not a single council, aside from Oldham, volunteered for a local inquiry when the Government first proposed a series of non-statutory local inquiries in January last year. In fact, some councils with a history of serious failings - including Bradford Council - have spent years defending their record and resisting calls for an inquiry in areas like Keighley.
So when the Inquiry team say they will “go where the evidence takes us”, the obvious question is - where is that “evidence” coming from? Because if it is coming from the very institutions who have long rejected the prospect of an inquiry, then this is not a fair process and risks repeating the same cover-ups it is supposed to confront.
And there is a further inconsistency. Oldham has clearly already met whatever threshold is being applied. So what exactly is the criteria? And why has Oldham been selected now, while areas with equally serious concerns are being told to wait months for a “framework” to be designed?
The reason we are having this inquiry in the first place is because there are still huge gaps in what we know and what we don’t know. Entire failures went unreported and ignored. So a process that says it will “follow the evidence” risks missing the very areas where evidence was never properly gathered or was actively overlooked by authorities in the first place.
Finally, there is one institution that consistently seems to be missing from scrutiny - the government itself. Given the scale of the issues being examined, it is difficult to see how an inquiry of this seriousness can avoid investigating central government decision-making, particularly at the Home Office, across both Conservative and Labour administrations.
This is particularly important given that the process leading up to this Inquiry has itself been affected by delays and failures within the Home Office, including recent concerns around the protection of key evidence.
For decades, the Home Office has repeatedly and wrongly given Councils like Bradford the power to decide whether or not they should be investigated. If this inquiry uncovers serious failings, it will inevitably show that the Home Office itself put the concerns of councils before survivors and allowed this scandal to persist.
A full and credible inquiry must be prepared to examine the role of the British state at the centre of this national scandal."
