Baroness Louise Casey feels she 'let victims down' in fight against Rotherham grooming gang scandal

Baroness Louise Casey has said she felt personally responsible for failing grooming gang victims when the scandal returned to national attention last year.

Addressing audiences at the Hay Festival today, the crossbench peer expressed deep frustration that a decade after her Rotherham inquiry, fundamental problems persisted.

"I was very disappointed, to put it mildly, I was really upset that in the intermediate 10 years (since Rotherham), not enough had changed," she said.

"Victims still weren't believed, people didn't gather the right evidence. I felt possibly, personally, that I had let those victims down."

Baroness Casey originally examined Rotherham Council following revelations that more than 1,400 children had suffered sexual exploitation at the hands of predominantly Asian male gangs in the South Yorkshire town between 1997 and 2013.

Her 2015 report uncovered pervasive failures throughout the council's culture and operational practices.

Speaking at the festival, she highlighted how reluctance to address the issue persisted.

She said: "Everybody was still squeamish over looking at both religion and ethnicity of perpetrators."

The peer described encountering "a sense of denial" when the grooming gangs controversy erupted again, prompting her to question what progress had actually been achieved since her initial investigation.

The Government subsequently commissioned a national audit from Baroness Casey, which identified the absence of data on grooming gang offenders' ethnicity and nationality as "a major failing over the last decade or more".

Her audit produced 12 recommendations, among them a call for a national inquiry into group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse, which ministers have since established.

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

• More than 200 arrive in small boats today as migrants make most of record-breaking May heat
• Keir Starmer calls teenagers who raped girls spared jail 'appalling' as sentences undergo review
• ‘The plan is working!’ Keir Starmer defends record in power as PM vows to ‘keep pushing forward’

Baroness Casey made clear she would not relent in pushing for implementation of her proposals.

"It's like a war of attrition, every single recommendation I'm like a dog with a bone, I just won't let go," she declared.

"That is never, ever going to happen again."

The statutory national inquiry will probe how police forces and social services neglected to properly pursue grooming gangs because they feared causing upset within ethnic communities.

Chaired by Baroness Longfield, the inquiry has secured £65million in government funding and will run for a maximum of three years, concluding no later than March 2029.

Local investigations will begin in Oldham, Greater Manchester, with the inquiry having the legal authority to compel public officials, police forces, and councils to provide evidence.

It comes as the Home Office has announced £100 million to fight child sex offences and protect victims and survivors, including £38 million for Operation Beaconport.

A historic £100 million will drive a crackdown on child sexual abuse, including tracking down grooming gang members, with an aim to protect victims and bring offenders to justice.

Zoë Billingham, one of three panel members, told the Home Affairs Committee that investigators would not "turn the other cheek" to evidence showing offenders were of Pakistani heritage.

She told MPs: "We've heard direct testimony from victims and survivors. We know that in terms of prosecutions in some parts of the country the perpetrators are from Asian Pakistani heritage."

"We're not going to shy away from that. We're not going to find excuses for that. In fact, quite the reverse."