The failure of officials to collect ethnicity data on grooming gangs which abused children has been a “bloody disaster”, the author of a damning report into the scandal has said.
Baroness Casey told MPs that information on perpetrators is “incomplete and unreliable”, which she described as a “public irresponsibility”.
Statistics had been “half” collected, she told members of the Commons Home Affairs committee, adding: “That’s a bloody disaster, frankly.”
Her “deeply disturbing” report into grooming gangs found children and teenage girls were blamed for crimes perpetrated against them and too many parts of the state had been in “denial” about what was going on.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper said there had been “too little justice” for victims as she announced a string of measures, including mandatory collection of data on the nationality and ethnicity of perpetrators and a time-limited national inquiry.
Baroness Louise Casey also the BBC she was “disappointed” by the Conservatives’s response to her review of the scandal, leaving leader Kemi Badenoch forced to insist she was not politicising the issue.
Speaking at a press conference alongside grooming gang survivors and campaigners, the Conservative leader said was “not doing politics now”, but criticised people who sought to “tone police those who are pointing out when something has gone wrong”.
She said: “I do think that we should take the politics out of it. But who was it that said when we raised this issue that we were pandering to the far right? That’s what brought the politics into it.”
