Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has met survivors of grooming gangs in Oldham and Rotherham, describing the meeting as “quite shocking”.
Speaking to GB News, she said it was “extraordinary” hearing victims describe going “to the authorities multiple times… and in one particular case the police actually handed her, a 12-year-old, into the hands of her abusers”.
Badenoch has been demanding a national inquiry into grooming gangs, but has faced criticism after reports she had so far failed to meet any victims.
On Monday, the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, joined growing calls for a full investigation, saying “nothing less… will restore faith in our safeguarding systems”.
Speaking to GB News on Monday evening, Badenoch said she was “going to do everything, and the Conservative Party is going to do everything, to make sure that you [survivors] get justice”.
Pressed on why the previous Conservative government had not commissioned an inquiry into grooming gangs, she said: “I think we thought that the inquiries that we’d started would be enough.”
“I thought ‘oh, there’s an inquiry taking place, let’s see what it comes out with,’ and what we’ve seen is that we’ve had multiple non-national inquiries. They are not enough. Let’s do more,” she said.
Badenoch said she believed a new national inquiry should look at what she called a “systematic pattern of behaviour” among certain communities in the country.
It is “people very, very poor, sort of peasant background – very, very rural, almost cut off from even the home origin countries that they might have been in,” she said. “They’re not necessarily first generation,” she added.
She said a “culture of silence” in the state needed to be addressed.
Between 1997 and 2013, several areas of the country – including Oldham and Rotherham – were blighted by gangs of men, predominantly of Pakistani descent, who raped and trafficked children as young as 11.
An independent report, published by Prof Alexis Jay in 2014, estimated 1,400 girls had been abused in Rotherham.
She would later go on to lead the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which lasted seven years and made 20 recommendations.
Prof Jay has previously said victims want to see action on her recommendations, rejecting the calls for a fresh probe.
There have also been a series of local reviews into child sex abuse in Manchester, Rochdale and Oldham, which were published between 2020 and 2024 and found authorities had failed to protect children from sexual exploitation by gangs of predominantly Asian men.
And in recent weeks, the Conservatives and Reform UK have been calling for a new national inquiry into grooming gangs.
Earlier this month MPs voted against a Tory move to force a fresh national investigation.
When asked whether the reason that a national inquiry had not been called was because politicians could be implicated in a cover-up, and whether the Labour Party was resisting an investigation, Badenoch said that it was “certainly something that we have to look at”.
“I don’t understand why, when there is so much support even from their own MPs… more and more people are coming out on the Labour side, and we cannot have a culture of fear,” she said.
“I am not afraid, the Conservative Party is under new leadership. What we did before to tackle it is clearly not enough, we need to do a lot more, and Labour needs to get on board with that. And if they don’t I think that they will have very serious questions to answer from the electorate when the time comes.”
Rochdale’s Labour MP joined the call for a new full inquiry on Monday, saying child sexual abuse was “endemic” in the UK and must be “a national priority”.
Champion, who has been campaigning on child protection for over a decade, said: “I have long believed that we need to fully understand the nature of this crime and the failures in the response of public bodies if we are to truly protect children.”
She also called for the recommendations of the IICSA report to be implemented “in full, with a timetable and ring-fenced resources”.
Two other Labour figures from places affected – Rochdale MP Paul Waugh and Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham – have also called for limited new inquiries.
But Downing Street has said its priority is to implement the recommendations of the IICSA report, published in 2022.
Last week, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said one of the key proposals from the report – mandatory reporting – would be added to the Crime and Policing Bill.
Number 10 said on Monday that there would be a “range of views” on the issue of a new inquiry, and the government would be “guided and led by the victims and survivors”.
