I have spent my career supporting vulnerable children. First as a teacher in some very tough schools, then as the founder and leader of a national charity bringing new people into frontline children’s social work to give every child the champion they need, and then as the Chair of the landmark national Independent Review of Children’s Social Care for the previous government, which included meeting with and hearing evidence from many victims of sexual abuse.
You can read my review here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-childrens-social-care-final-report
This should assure you that this issue is important to me and I know it intimately.
I have therefore been deeply troubled to see a gravely serious issue like this exploited by an ill-informed American billionaire and political opportunists here in the UK to score cheap points at the expense of delivering justice for victims and ensuring a scandal like this never happens again.
MPs are elected to be problem solvers, not problem exploiters. But what Conservative and Reform MPs did this week was attempt to vote down a Bill – the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill – which contains significant measures to keep children safe and protect them from this sort of abuse. I know this because I recommended many of the measures it includes in my Independent Review back in 2022. Measures which were ignored by the previous Conservative government but which will now be delivered in this Bill by a Labour government, who I have been working with on the content of this Bill for several months.
Here are some of the key child protection elements:
- Introducing a register of children not in school and new powers to protect children who are at risk of significant harm who are not in school to make sure no child falls through the cracks. If this had been in place two years ago when first recommended, the horrific murder of Sara Sharif by her parents might have been prevented.
- Implementing multi-agency child protection teams and strengthening existing multi-agency safeguarding arrangements; bringing social workers, schools, police, health providers and others together to quickly and accurately identify and respond to harm to children who are at risk.
- Introducing a single child identifier so that information can be shared live between agencies, removing the fog of confused or partial information sharing.
The Bill also saves parents money by rolling out free breakfast clubs in every primary school and limiting the number of branded uniform items schools can require children to wear. If you’ve got a child in primary school these measures could save you approximately £500 per year.
I was proud to vote for the Bill and not for the Conservative wrecking amendment which would have seen all of these measures fail and put more children at risk of abuse.
I expect this sort of thing from Nigel Farage, who is never happier than when he is exploiting tensions for political gain (that is when he bothers to turn up to Parliament when he isn’t selling gold bullion or appearing on GB News (second jobs which earned him half a million pounds in the last six months)). But I expected better from the Conservatives, some of whom I have worked with in my previous roles and who I know take this issue seriously. Unfortunately their new leader clearly does not. Kemi Badenoch has been an MP for eight years. She served as Children’s Minister and as Women & Equalities Minister in the last government. Until this week she hadn’t once raised child sexual abuse in Parliament.
The politician who has raised this consistently and repeatedly throughout their career in and out of politics is the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. He knows this issue inside and out, cares passionately about tackling child sexual abuse and delivering justice for victims, and has an undeniable track record of taking action. As Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013 he prosecuted dozens of grooming gang members in Rochdale and other towns – including overturning some decisions not to prosecute made before his appointment – and completely overhauled the way the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) deals with child sex abuse and grooming cases to make it easier to prosecute perpetrators. And he regularly meets with victims of child sexual abuse, unlike Kemi Badenoch, who was forced to admit this week that she has never met any victims of grooming gangs and has no plans to do so.
I’ll highlight this 2013 report from the cross-party Home Affairs Select Committee which said that, under Keir Starmer’s leadership, “unlike many other official agencies implicated in this issue”, the CPS had “readily admitted that victims had been let down by them and have attempted both to discover the cause of this systematic failure and to improve the way things are done so as to avoid a repetition of such events”.
The truth is we do not need another lengthy national inquiry into this issue which will delay justice even further. We had one under the last government, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). It took seven years, is 468 pages long and produced 20 serious recommendations. You can read it here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/iicsa-report-of-the-independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-abuse
As part of this seven year inquiry, there was a dedicated two year investigation into child sexual exploitation specifically by gangs which took extensive evidence from across the country: https://www.iicsa.org.uk/investigations-research/investigations/child-sexual-exploitation-by-groups-and-gangs.html
It is simply not true, as the Conservatives are claiming, that IICSA did not consider grooming gangs. The problem is that the recommendations were not implemented under the Conservatives. Labour has committed to delivering on 19 of them and we have already started that work. The leader of that inquiry, Baroness Jay, agrees that there is no need for a further inquiry. Many victims who engaged with that inquiry agree that we do not need another inquiry. We should listen to the victims and the experts, not Elon Musk, and get on with delivering justice and preventing further abuse.
You can read the Home Secretary’s update to Parliament on the action the government is taking to tackle child sexual abuse and grooming gangs here: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/tackling-child-sexual-abuse
I want to see recommendations from reviews delivered, including those from my own which now form part of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. I will be following the development of this Bill closely as it makes its way through Parliament to ensure it contains robust provisions to protect children from harm and gives professionals who work with children the tools they need to identify issues at the earliest opportunity and take all necessary action.
You can watch my speech in the debate on the Bill this week here: https://youtu.be/CQ5JWw94_D0
Finally, I think it is important to note that, according to the National Police Chief’s Council, only 5% of child sexual abuse and exploitation crimes are group-based. It is very important that we tackle grooming gangs, and that we are candid when there is a racial component to this, but we must not overlook the 95% of child sexual abuse not carried out by grooming gangs. Victims of these crimes also deserve our attention.
I hope you will be assured from this response that I understand this issue, I have been actively engaged in this issue for many years, and I am committed to taking serious action to address this issue, as is the government I support.
Thanks again for getting in touch and if you have any other questions or concerns to raise with me or if I can help you with anything, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
If you’d like to keep up to date with my work with and on behalf of local people, please subscribe to my monthly e-newsletter at joshmacalister.uk/enews
Best wishes,
Josh MacAlister OBE MP
Labour Member of Parliament for Whitehaven & Workington
Josh MacAlister MP 