I call shadow Minister Katie Lam.

I welcome today’s action plan. I particularly welcome the creation of a new child protection authority and the doubling of funding for groups who are helping survivors and victims of child abuse, up and down the country.

The independent inquiry into grooming gangs in Rochdale, commissioned by Greater Manchester’s Mayor, Andy Burnham, was detailed and thorough, and found serious failings by the statutory authorities.

The priority for my constituents is to ensure that we are protecting women and girls in the here and now, as well as convicting perpetrators of past crimes.

Few people know that there is no specific criminal offence of grooming, so may I thoroughly welcome the Government’s decision to make grooming an aggravating offence in child sex abuse, with longer sentences?

That is long overdue, as it was recommended in Alexis Jay’s inquiry, but ignored by the previous Government.

I call the spokesperson for the Liberal Democrat party.

I thank the Minister for advance sight of the statement and for the progress update to Parliament, as promised. We welcome the progress that is being made by the Government on this issue, which tragically continues to blight our society.

As the Minister said, children across this country are still victims of these abhorrent crimes, and survivors await justice from previous abuse and exploitation The Liberal Democrats believe, as Members from across the House would echo, that no child should ever be subjected to sexual abuse or exploitation, and it is clear that real action is needed to prevent such sickening acts from occurring.

We have made it clear that steps must be taken at all levels of Government to better protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation in the future, and to fully deliver justice for survivors and victims.

In particular, we welcome the Government’s announcement of a new child protection authority and extra funding for national services that support adult survivors of sexual abuse. In fact, my hon.

Friend the Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) tabled an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to establish a child protection authority, and I know she is delighted to see that coming forward today.

The Lib Dems are committed to working proactively and constructively with the Government and the whole House to support and protect vulnerable children at risk of exploitation and abuse, unlike the Conservatives, sadly, who are still shamefully using the victims of grooming gangs scandal as a political football—[Interruption.

] The Liberal Democrats continue to commend the work of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse by Professor Alexis Jay.

We continue to call on the Government to urgently implement all 20 of her recommendations that, as the Minister has mentioned, the Conservatives failed to act on in government.

The Minister has spoken about some of the recommendations today, namely national leadership, learning on child protection and safeguarding, and a mandatory duty to report, but can she commit today to implementing all the report’s recommendations?

In so doing, can she confirm that the new child protection authority will act as a national oversight mechanism to monitor the implementation of the Jay review’s recommendations across all relevant agencies and Departments? If not, will such a mechanism be brought forward?

The Lib Dems support anything that will deliver justice for victims and help to prevent these sickening crimes from happening in future.

When Alexis Jay appeared before the Home Affairs Committee earlier this year, she was clear that at no point in seven years, under seven Conservative Home Secretaries, did anyone say that her inquiry was either too broad or too narrow, and nobody suggested to her that there needed to be further inquiries beyond what she produced.

I welcome the Minister’s announcement that the three-year limitation period will be lifted, because we know that the average length of abuse for children is four years, and the average length of time that it takes someone to disclose their abuse is 26 years.

Will the Minister set out how the child protection authority will work in practice? What will the funding situation be and what discussions has the Minister had with the Treasury?

What is the timing to get it up and running as soon as possible, and may I ask for a guarantee that the voices of survivors will be central in the establishment of the authority?

I agree with my hon. Friend that the voices of survivors have to be part of absolutely everything that we do going forward. The CPA will immediately form part of the panel and extra funding will be provided in this year’s funding to build on the analytical resources that it needs.

The consultation will be ongoing with experts, including the likes of Alexis Jay, who has been very involved in the conversations—finally; unfortunately, she had previously been left out in the cold—and we will look at what the best model will be, along with survivors and experts in the field.

I have to say that I am completely infuriated by today’s statement. Here we are, on the very last sitting day before the Easter recess, and the Government have all but admitted that no real progress whatsoever has been made on their promise to launch five local rape gang inquiries before Easter.

It gets worse: for more than five years, leaders at the very top of Bradford council in my constituency have denied, refused and covered up, every single time I and victims, survivors and their families have called for a full rape gang inquiry across Keighley and the wider Bradford district.

Yet the Minister and this Government refuse to face the facts. Bradford’s leadership simply will not act by itself, so why are this Government letting the very councils that failed victims decide whether they want to be investigated?

When will this Government step up, use their statutory powers and give the victims and survivors in areas such as Keighley and the wider Bradford district the full inquiry that they have wanted for almost two decades?

I welcome the Minister’s statement and the progress that she is making. I thank her for her very long and deep commitment to this issue and to seeing justice for victims. I will ask her about the version of mandatory reporting that she proposes to introduce.

My understanding is that the mandatory reporting duty will apply in situations where a person has witnessed abuse or received a disclosure of abuse, which seems to be quite a high bar.

There are many examples of abuse taking place in schools and in children’s homes, for example, in which it emerged later that suspicions of abuse were very widespread, but nobody witnessed the abuse, received a disclosure of it or reported their suspicions, allowing the abuse to continue.

Is my hon. Friend confident that the version of mandatory reporting that she is introducing is at the right threshold? Will she commit to review the impact of the new measure once it has taken effect and to strengthen it in future if needed?

I praise my hon. Friend for her commitment to these issues over the years. She is right: the thresholds for mandatory reporting are a finely balanced tool.

We had to land on the criminal justice outcomes for the most egregious cases, as other Members have mentioned, where it seemed that social workers were directly covering up and where there were professional sanctions when people just failed to report. She talked about the issue of signs.

I very much hope that that will be dealt with in the training and the roll-out of this measure, but when any new law comes into place and we roll out training, we will absolutely review it as we go along.

I welcome the mandatory reporting progress. It is worth acknowledging the Bill that I led through the House, which has now paid out £100 million in Northern Ireland to survivors of institutional sexual abuse.

During the progress of that Bill and the discussions I had, the mealy-mouthed apologies from institutions were abhorrent. May I urge the Minister to push very hard on church institutions and other institutions to ensure that they pay and they apologise?

Absolutely. Some of the changes that the right hon. Gentleman will read about in the documents that will be published subsequently concern that exact issue of an apology, and the limitations of mealy-mouthed apologies.

What that means to the victims is so awful, so I will absolutely commit to push the institutions to do exactly what they need to do to make honest apologies. I have to say that, in recent weeks and months, we have not always had the best examples of that on display.

In answer to my hon. Friend’s first question, at the beginning of next month, we will publish exactly how local panels can be set up and the work that can happen in local authority areas. Alongside the mandatory duty legislation, there will be written guidance, and training will be provided.

When we talk about people who work with children, we often think of teachers or social workers, but we are also talking about sports coaches, people in the clergy, and lots of other people, so the guidance will have to be both quite widely drawn and specific.

I welcome the Minister’s statement. I share her disappointment that the Conservatives have sought to pick out one particular community. Day after day in this Chamber, they vilify Muslims.

As somebody who has Muslim family and brown skin, I say that we feel increasingly uncomfortable in our own country, given the attacks that we hear, day after day, from the Conservatives on all Muslims. It is an absolute disgrace. I welcome the child protection authority.

On the fact that the Conservatives did not introduce it when they were in government and able to do so, Professor Jay told me that they claimed that they did not have legislative time. We all know that they did.

I press the Minister to give me her personal assurance that she will work with her colleagues in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to ensure that we strengthen our online safety regulation and do not water it down in any way, because Professor Jay is very clear that online sexual exploitation and abuse are huge and growing.

I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady. Even in the two and a half years since Alexis Jay published her review, we have come to know even more about the harms occurring online.

The Online Safety Act 2023 finally came into force only last month, but the Government have made it clear that where there is a need to go further on various issues, such as on the recommendations made by Alexis Jay, we will absolutely look at that.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Really working in partnership, and not just saying that we are, is important at the highest level, here in these buildings and in Whitehall.

We have set up an inter-ministerial group—I am a member of it, together with the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby)—to ensure that we are working together.

The level of engagement from Ministers and Secretaries of State, working through the Cabinet Office, has made it a pleasure to produce these documents. We have to make sure that this work is also happening locally.

Measures in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to improve multi-agency working, and the reform of social work, will be vital to our finally getting a grip on this issue.

I know that the Minister will join me in paying tribute to child sexual abuse specialist prosecutors, who deploy their considerable expertise to put together cases that can be based on complex and—as we have heard—very distressing evidence.

Will the Minister make sure that a fair share of resources reach those prosecutors? She will recognise that just as the public expect child sexual abuse to be detected, they also expect it to be effectively prosecuted.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman makes a really good point. The legal process is a forgotten part of the system; having worked for many years with Nazir Afzal, for example, who was the prosecutor on the Rochdale cases, I can say that those prosecutors can really be forgotten.

We have asked the joint inspectorate to look specifically into the justice system and what needs to be done, but there are undoubtedly cases waiting in the long backlog because the prosecutors, defence and court space are not available.

Dealing with that has to be part of a much bigger piece of work, but I will absolutely take away what the right hon. and learned Gentleman has said.

I thank my hon. Friend for her statement, and I pay tribute to her for her considerable expertise in this field. The victim-survivors of childhood sexual abuse have spent far too long waiting for justice. As my hon. Friend said, childhood sexual abuse knows no hierarchy; it also knows no borders.

We have different legislative systems within this country, and we cannot allow action to be taken in one area only, with victims potentially being left out. What discussions is my hon. Friend having with the Scottish Government, so that we can take this work forward on a joint basis?

I share the anger and frustration expressed by my hon.

Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) about the lack of progress on inquiring into the rape gangs, and I was incredibly disappointed by the Minister’s failure to answer a single question put to her by the shadow Minister, my hon.

Friend the Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam), including the refusal to acknowledge that these crimes were racially and religiously aggravated.

I will repeat just one of those questions: in many of the rape gang cases, councillors, council workers and police officers were complicit and often corrupt, so why are the Government refusing to set up a specialist unit in the National Crime Agency to investigate those who should have protected those innocent girls, but instead participated in and facilitated their abuse?

To answer the hon.

Gentleman’s question, if criminal cases can be brought against any of those people, I am more than happy to speak to the taskforce that is working to improve the number of arrests—as I said, we have seen an increase in arrests—and see where criminal cases can be brought against them.

I am more than happy to see those people locked up for as long as they deserve. However, we were left for some decades without a mandatory reporting duty on the statute books, one that would enable us to take to task, through the criminal justice system, the people who covered this up.

We will rectify that.

I thank the Minister for her statement; I do not think there is anyone who could lead more credibly on this issue.

It is absolutely disgusting that the last Government had 89 weeks to implement the recommendations of the Jay inquiry but implemented absolutely zero of them, yet Conservative Members come here today to grandstand on this issue.

A decade ago, the Director of Public Prosecutions recommended mandatory reporting—he happens to be our Prime Minister now, of course—so it has taken 10 years for this to happen. What has been lost in that time, and what can be gained in the coming years?

Unfortunately, what has been lost in that time is the ability to hold people to account. Even if, in a statutory inquiry, information was found out, for example about councillors, that would not lead to their arrest—that is not what a statutory inquiry does.

Nobody is in prison as a result of any of the statutory inquiries we have had, so we want to focus our attention on criminalising those people. I am afraid to say that in the absence of mandatory reporting, we have seen lots of people get away with cover-ups in the intervening years.

What I hope for the future is not that I see lots of people locked up who are bad, but that this change creates a culture of openness and transparency in child protection services. That is what should be celebrated, not the reputation of the organisation.

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. We now have many laws on coercion in our country—passing laws on coercion is something that the previous Government did do.

If it can be evidenced that anybody coerced somebody into not reporting, or gently tried to cover something up, that would be seen as criminal and considered to be a cover-up. Obviously, this will all be tested when such cases come to pass.

Funnily enough, the Crime and Policing Bill Committee, which I am also meant to be on, may get up to clause 45 today—we will get back to that Committee immediately after this statement. I am more than happy to have conversations with the hon.

Lady, but the Church, faith leaders and faith groups are absolutely within the purview of the measures. Making sure that we do not create workarounds for certain things is in everybody’s best interest.

The shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam), gave very graphic and disturbing examples of horrific abuse suffered by just a couple of the young ladies affected by these grooming gangs.

She asked important questions about the gangs, and I was disappointed that instead of answering her questions, the Minister talked about the number of meetings that her predecessors have had, and about the fact that many girls are abused by people who are not in grooming gangs.

Of course that is true, but both are important. The Minister, in answer to an earlier question, invited another Member “to push for more, as I would do if I were not in my current ministerial position.” Why are the inquiries limited to only five areas? What about those in the other areas?

Does she not recognise that giving people a choice on whether their area is investigated or not is an incentive for those who wish to cover up either to not bid or to not bid well for those inquiries?

Above all, who or what is preventing her from delivering the more that she would push for if she was sitting here?

Absolutely nobody is stopping me from pushing for more, as I am sure all my ministerial colleagues would tell the hon. Lady, having been in meetings with me. I think this is about the point of view of Parliament. Parliament is here to strength-test the things we do, and I welcome that.

To the point that the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) made, this is just the beginning, not the end, as I said in my statement. The details of how local areas can bid into that scheme will, as I have said, be published by the end of the month.

I mentioned grooming gang victims many, many times throughout my statement. I also mentioned other victims in the many other inquiries that have gone on. I only wish that people were quite so well versed in some of the other areas.

My only criticism of the shadow Minister on the shadow Front Bench is that she only mentioned one; I mentioned many.

I know the Minister is passionate about this issue and I commend her for her efforts. Would she not agree that the sentencing for these most abhorrent crimes needs to truly reflect the seriousness of the offence?

I do not think anyone can sit in this House today and not be broken or feel sick to the pit of their stomach when we hear accounts from the Front Benchers. Anyone who takes away the innocence of a child must serve the toughest of sentences.

After all, these children have been subjected to a lifetime of trauma as a result of these horrific acts.

The hon. Lady makes a good point, because for the victims I have worked with over the years, it is a life sentence; it is not something that goes away.

That is one of the reasons I feel strongly about trying to improve the levels of therapeutic support for children and adults, and that has been a real priority for me. She is absolutely right on the sentencing.

The Government are undertaking a sentencing review in the broader sense, and we are putting grooming as an aggravating factor into sentencing and into the law. I am meant to be in two places at once, and in fact that clause is probably being discussed in Committee literally right now.

Specifically on victims of grooming, we will set out the commissioning for the new service across England and Wales for the independent child trafficking guardians, as I said in my statement.

Children who access through the national referral mechanism as trafficking victims—lots of British children who are groomed access through that system—will be able to access support through that service.

As is laid out in the documents, improvements are needed in children’s sexual violence therapeutic support. Anyone who has worked on the frontline would know that, as would anyone who has tried to make a referral through the generic services.

It would be disingenuous of me to stand here before the comprehensive spending review and make a commitment —I am not sure the Chancellor would thank me—but one of the major recommendations of IICSA was about children’s therapeutic support, which is very much at the front of my mind while we go through the comprehensive spending review.

I thank the Minister for her answers and her commitment to bring justice for the victims. No one denies that the hon. Lady has a big heart and a real determination to get the answers we all wish to see.

With sexual offences at an all-time high in Northern Ireland—I know that she has an interest in Northern Ireland—and with some 4,232 such incidents recorded between April 2022 and March 2023, which was an increase of some 4.

7% on the previous year, it is clear that the protection of children, our most vulnerable people, needs to be a priority. What discussions will she have with the Northern Ireland Assembly to ensure that Northern Ireland has the support needed to address these horrifying figures?

We have to understand that every incident reported sits against those that are not. We are perhaps just not getting to the real figure.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that although we have arguments in this House about data, what data has not been collected and what progress we have made, the reality is that we will never know about the vast majority of data, because we do not ever see it.

That is something we should all strive to overcome. I visited Northern Ireland recently and went to the Police Service of Northern Ireland and worked specifically with the team dealing with online child sex abuse.

We looked at the processes they were undertaking through undercover action on that particular issue. That will continue, and not just because part of my heart is in Northern Ireland through my father.

Having worked with the PSNI and met those in the Executive, I know that there is real determination in Northern Ireland. That is perhaps because it is largely led by women—well done, Northern Ireland—but there is real appetite, and we will happily work with those people as much as we can.