GB News has pinpointed five areas in Britain that have never received a formal inquiry into grooming gangs despite being home to a plethora of related prosecutions.
Our analysis comes as Labour faces fresh scrutiny over its handling of the grooming gang scandal.
Labour defeated a vote on a national inquiry in the Commons in January, insisting that the grooming gangs, which have operated in 50 towns and cities across the UK since the mid-90s by our estimates, had been sufficiently addressed and that further national inquiries would not add significant new insights or solutions.
However, in the face of growing pressure, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper pledged £5million to support five local investigations into grooming gangs.
Labour now appears to have reneged on this commitment, with Home Office minister Jess Phillips announcing on Tuesday that it will adopt a “flexible approach” to its plans for five local grooming gang inquiries, leaving it to local councils to request funding, if they so wish.
This has fuelled accusations that the Government is watering down the scandal, or, as Tory MP Robbie Moore put it, the five local inquiries had “been kicked into the long grass”.
Amid the reprisals, a deeper scandal is not being addressed, one that our national reporter Charlie Peters has shone a light on through his investigations.
As Peters explains, there have been high-profile inquiries into the grooming gang abuses in Rotherham, Telford and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which has been heavily criticised for "lumping" grooming gangs in with other abuse networks and focusing on six areas where the proportion of the population of Pakistani origin is lower than the national average (despite their overwhelming representation in grooming gang prosecutions).
Other hotspots have been subject to serious case reviews, reports, or internal investigations, but no formal inquiries.
We have pinpointed five areas in Britain that have been rocked by grooming gang prosecutions yet to this day have never received a formal inquiry (see map below).
Five areas in Britain rocked by grooming gang prosecutions that have never received a formal inquiry
Flourish
Let's take a closer look at the known prosecutions in each area. We have not factored in pending convictions and ongoing trials.
Bradford
The lack of a formal inquiry in Bradford is particularly striking as the scale of child sexual abuse and exploitation across the district is feared to "dwarf that of Rotherham", reckons Conservative MP Robbie Moore.
Grooming gangs have exploited vulnerable girls in children’s homes, hotels, and private houses in the West Yorkshire city for decades.
In one high-profile case in 209, nine men were jailed for a total of 132 years for an “appalling catalogue” of sexual abuse against two young girls in Bradford.
All told, we have identified at least 41 known prosecutions.
Huddersfield
In Huddersfield, there have been growing concerns raised about a lack of inquiry into cases, particularly regarding a grooming ring involving multiple girls where social workers failed to act on evidence of potential harm.
In 2018, twenty men were found guilty of being part of a grooming gang that raped and abused girls as young as 11 in Huddersfield.
The men were convicted of more than 120 offences against 15 girls.
Victims were plied with drink and drugs and then "used and abused at will" in a seven-year "campaign of rape and abuse" between 2004 and 2011.
Seven men were convicted in 2020 as part of West Yorkshire Police's Operation Tendersea investigation into child sexual exploitation in the town.
Since then, further men have been convicted in a series of trials, including five men who were convicted for a second time in April 2023 after previously being jailed, bringing the total number of known perpetrators convicted to 42.
Oxford/Banbury
Despite the scale of the abuse in Oxfordshire laid bare in a serious case review in 2015, a formal inquiry has never been brought.
The serious case review by the Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children Board (OSCB) concluded that up to 373 children may have been targeted for sexual exploitation by gangs of men in Oxfordshire over a 16-year period (1999–2014).
The review came after a sadistic sex gang of seven men were convicted in 2013 for grooming and sexually abusing six girls in Oxford between 2004 and 2012.
The same year the review was published a gang of five men and a teenager who subjected underage girls to sexual abuse in Banbury after grooming were jailed.
In January 2019, three men—Anjum Dogar, Mohammed Karrar, and Bassam Karrar—were convicted of additional charges related to the sexual abuse of an Oxford schoolgirl between 2002 and 2005. All three were already serving life sentences from the 2013 convictions.
Despite the pool of potential victims, there have only been 30 convictions recorded in the Oxford/Banbury area to date.
However, Simon Morton, former senior investigating officer for Thames Valley Police who led Operation Bullfinch, then the biggest criminal investigation in Oxford's history, told the BBC in January that perpetrators in the area are operating and are "influencing and arranging others to do the same thing".
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Up to 373 children may have been targeted for sexual exploitation by gangs of men in Oxfordshire over a 16-year period
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Newcastle
The city of Newcastle has been rocked by several sadistic sex gang rings with no formal inquiry to show for it.
The most serious convictions have come as a result of Operation Sanctuary, which was set up in December 2013 to investigate claims of sexual abuse against girls and young women.
A subset of Operation Sanctuary, Operation Shelter, uncovered groups of men in the West End of Newcastle - many of whom were known to each other - who exploited vulnerable young women and girls over a period from 2010 to 2014.
In 2017, the operation led to the conviction of 18 people for abusing girls as young as 14. They were plied with alcohol and drugs before being forced to have sex.
In March this year, four men were sentenced for offences committed between August 2018 and April 2019.
The girl said her four attackers, aged between 15 and 21, "tortured" her, making childhood a "living nightmare".
This brings the total number of known convictions in Newcastle to 27.
London
We have uncovered significant evidence that points to London being a hotbed for grooming gangs.
London accounted for 22 per cent of all referrals of minors for sexual exploitation in England and Wales between 2015 and 2019, which hints at the scale of abuse.
Operation Grandbye was launched following reports of grooming activities, notably around a McDonald's in the Stratford Centre, where four teenage girls aged between 13 and 15 reported being raped by a group operating from that location in 2017.
However, providing an exact tally of grooming gang convictions to date is challenging due to factors such as underreporting, variations in record-keeping, and the evolving nature of investigations.
Furthermore, London Mayor Sadiq Khan has rejected calls for an inquiry into the presence of grooming gangs.
Tories on the London Assembly had proposed an amendment to Sadiq Khan’s budget, which included £4.49m for an “Independent Inquiry into the Exploitation of Children in London”.
In their budget amendment, the Conservatives said: “The potential scale of child sexual abuse across London remains a significant unknown.
“Given that there are more than fifty areas across the country that have been identified as locations in which the systemic rape of young children by grooming gangs took place, there is a strong possibility that this criminality also occurred in London.”
