Jessaline Caine works in planning and writes about politics and policy.
There are few scandals in modern Britain more thoroughly exposed, and yet more stubbornly unresolved, than the grooming gangs scandal.
Indeed, more than a decade ago, Parliament was taking evidence on ‘localised grooming’ in areas such as Rochdale and Rotherham. In 2014, Alexis Jay concluded that at least 1,400 children had been sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.
By then, the pattern was clear that vulnerable girls, often already known to social services, were raped and trafficked while police, councils and safeguarding agencies looked away.
Now, after years of reports, reviews and ministerial promises, Baroness Casey’s 2025 audit has prompted a statutory inquiry. Ministers insist the machinery is moving. Critics are less convinced.
The government accepted Casey’s recommendations in 2025, told petitioners that work was already under way, and by 1 June 2026 was still promising legislation to mandate the collection of ethnicity data. For a scandal defined by institutional evasion, this is not exactly a brisk start.
Into this long history of official failure steps Rupert Lowe, with his crowdfunded Rape Gang Inquiry. It is an understandable intervention. But is it a good one?
Lowe has built a colossal amount of political capital posting about his inquiry. He has positioned himself as the man willing to say what Westminster will not, name who others will not, and force into the open what institutions have buried. I understand why that appeals. When the state has failed children so catastrophically, anger is not only inevitable; it is a driver of moral imperative.
I too feel that same anger towards the system. I am not a victim of grooming gangs, and I have no wish to borrow the suffering of those who are. But I do know something about child sexual abuse, foster care and the failures of the state. I was sexually abused as a child, later entered care, and was abused again for a year while the state was supposed to be acting as my corporate parent.
That experience leaves me difficult to impress.
So too did the Westminster Hall debate on Monday, which had been politically oversold before most MPs had even taken their seats. Rupert Lowe publicly framed it as a debate on grooming gangs. It was not. It was a debate on child sexual offender data. He also promised to name and shame MPs who failed to attend, despite the room itself having a maximum capacity of around 50 people. Labour’s Jonathan Brash was right to challenge that framing.
The distinction matters. Serious causes are not strengthened by turning them into an episode of EastEnders.
The central problem with Lowe’s private inquiry is that it appears to collapse too many things into one: inquiry, campaign vehicle, media platform, parliamentary naming exercise and potential private prosecution fund. Each may have its place. Thrown together, they create obvious risks.
Moral force is not legal force. A crowdfunded inquiry cannot compel witnesses in the way a statutory inquiry can. It cannot drag reluctant officials, police forces or councils to the table with the same authority. It may expose a vacuum. It cannot, by itself, fill it.
There is a danger here of mistaking noise for justice. Victims of child sexual abuse have already been failed by people who performed concern while failing to protect them. They deserve better than another process whose authority depends on publicity, pressure and personality.
And yet Lowe spoke with real force. He had invited grooming gang survivors to watch from the public gallery and thanked them for attending. The testimonies he read were harrowing. Mainly white working class girls raised in care or known to authorities, targeted because they were vulnerable, and in some cases racially degraded during the abuse.
Esther McVey, a far stronger parliamentary performer than most of the room, gave Lowe serious support and grounded much of her argument in existing reports. Nigel Farage made one of the most important contributions of the debate. Whatever Conservatives think of him, and we have spent many years thinking quite a lot of things, he identified the point many victims and members of the public have made for years: that justice was not always pursued with the force it deserved because authorities feared the political and racial sensitivities of the cases before them.
The debate exposed three things.
First, the state’s data on child sexual abuse is inadequate. Baroness Casey was clear that the lack of ethnicity data has left Britain trapped between denial and overstatement. That is precisely why Suella Braverman and Esther McVey were right to argue for mandatory ethnicity and nationality data collection. Collecting facts is the minimum requirement of serious government, not ‘sowing division’ as some Members thought.
Second, some MPs remain more frightened of the political consequences of evidence than of the institutional failures that made evidence necessary. Ayoub Khan outrageously warned that some campaigners use children’s suffering to stoke communal blame as some obscene deflection. That concern is not inherently illegitimate. Incomplete data can be abused by malicious actors. But the answer to bad data is better data, not stupid moral panic about the act of measuring.
Third, the Government cannot complain about Lowe filling a vacuum it helped create. For years, victims were disbelieved, dismissed or treated as inconvenient. Councils failed. Police failed. Social services failed. Governments of both parties failed. If Westminster now finds Lowe’s methods uncomfortable, it might ask why so many victims and campaigners concluded that only discomfort worked.
Still, criticism of Lowe’s method is not defence of the state. The right should be capable of holding both thoughts at once, heroic though that may sound. The Government has been too slow. Lowe’s inquiry may be too loose. Victims deserve neither bureaucratic drift nor crowdfunded improvisation.
Farage was right to argue that Parliament now needs a mechanism with teeth. Not another report to be admired, shelved and solemnly rediscovered in, what, five years’ time? Yes, a serious committee, with powers to compel evidence and real consequences for misleading Parliament, would be a better answer than another round of mournful speeches followed by ministerial drift.
Some supporters on the Conservative right should not be embarrassed to say so. If the last government was too wary on offender data, and it was, then Conservatives should say so, fix it, and move on.
There are moments when the right has to stop behaving like a set of rival estate agents fighting over the same semi-detached. Come on. This should be one of them.
For all the factional noise, much of what was said by Lowe, Reform MPs and Conservative MPs pointed in the same direction. The state failed vulnerable girls. Data on offenders must be collected honestly. Children in care need far stronger protection. Officials who obstructed, minimised or concealed abuse should face consequences.
It is the basic duty of a functioning state.
That does not require Conservatives to outsource the issue to Lowe, Farage or anyone else. It requires us to lead on it.
The grooming gang scandal is too serious for political point scoring. It is also too serious for another state-managed exercise in delay after delay. If we cannot speak clearly about the rape and trafficking of vulnerable children, the failures of corporate parenting, and the need for truthful data, then what exactly are we conserving? The minutes of the last safeguarding failure?
Victims need evidence, prosecutions, proper safeguarding, transparent data and accountability for the adults who failed them.
They were not symbols, slogans or props in someone else’s war.
They were children. And the adults failed them.
Jessaline Caine works in planning and writes about politics and policy.
There are few scandals in modern Britain more thoroughly exposed, and yet more stubbornly unresolved, than the grooming gangs scandal.
Indeed, more than a decade ago, Parliament was taking evidence on ‘localised grooming’ in areas such as Rochdale and Rotherham. In 2014, Alexis Jay concluded that at least 1,400 children had been sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.
By then, the pattern was clear that vulnerable girls, often already known to social services, were raped and trafficked while police, councils and safeguarding agencies looked away.
Now, after years of reports, reviews and ministerial promises, Baroness Casey’s 2025 audit has prompted a statutory inquiry. Ministers insist the machinery is moving. Critics are less convinced.
The government accepted Casey’s recommendations in 2025, told petitioners that work was already under way, and by 1 June 2026 was still promising legislation to mandate the collection of ethnicity data. For a scandal defined by institutional evasion, this is not exactly a brisk start.
Into this long history of official failure steps Rupert Lowe, with his crowdfunded Rape Gang Inquiry. It is an understandable intervention. But is it a good one?
Lowe has built a colossal amount of political capital posting about his inquiry. He has positioned himself as the man willing to say what Westminster will not, name who others will not, and force into the open what institutions have buried. I understand why that appeals. When the state has failed children so catastrophically, anger is not only inevitable; it is a driver of moral imperative.
I too feel that same anger towards the system. I am not a victim of grooming gangs, and I have no wish to borrow the suffering of those who are. But I do know something about child sexual abuse, foster care and the failures of the state. I was sexually abused as a child, later entered care, and was abused again for a year while the state was supposed to be acting as my corporate parent.
That experience leaves me difficult to impress.
So too did the Westminster Hall debate on Monday, which had been politically oversold before most MPs had even taken their seats. Rupert Lowe publicly framed it as a debate on grooming gangs. It was not. It was a debate on child sexual offender data. He also promised to name and shame MPs who failed to attend, despite the room itself having a maximum capacity of around 50 people. Labour’s Jonathan Brash was right to challenge that framing.
The distinction matters. Serious causes are not strengthened by turning them into an episode of EastEnders.
The central problem with Lowe’s private inquiry is that it appears to collapse too many things into one: inquiry, campaign vehicle, media platform, parliamentary naming exercise and potential private prosecution fund. Each may have its place. Thrown together, they create obvious risks.
Moral force is not legal force. A crowdfunded inquiry cannot compel witnesses in the way a statutory inquiry can. It cannot drag reluctant officials, police forces or councils to the table with the same authority. It may expose a vacuum. It cannot, by itself, fill it.
There is a danger here of mistaking noise for justice. Victims of child sexual abuse have already been failed by people who performed concern while failing to protect them. They deserve better than another process whose authority depends on publicity, pressure and personality.
And yet Lowe spoke with real force. He had invited grooming gang survivors to watch from the public gallery and thanked them for attending. The testimonies he read were harrowing. Mainly white working class girls raised in care or known to authorities, targeted because they were vulnerable, and in some cases racially degraded during the abuse.
Esther McVey, a far stronger parliamentary performer than most of the room, gave Lowe serious support and grounded much of her argument in existing reports. Nigel Farage made one of the most important contributions of the debate. Whatever Conservatives think of him, and we have spent many years thinking quite a lot of things, he identified the point many victims and members of the public have made for years: that justice was not always pursued with the force it deserved because authorities feared the political and racial sensitivities of the cases before them.
The debate exposed three things.
First, the state’s data on child sexual abuse is inadequate. Baroness Casey was clear that the lack of ethnicity data has left Britain trapped between denial and overstatement. That is precisely why Suella Braverman and Esther McVey were right to argue for mandatory ethnicity and nationality data collection. Collecting facts is the minimum requirement of serious government, not ‘sowing division’ as some Members thought.
Second, some MPs remain more frightened of the political consequences of evidence than of the institutional failures that made evidence necessary. Ayoub Khan outrageously warned that some campaigners use children’s suffering to stoke communal blame as some obscene deflection. That concern is not inherently illegitimate. Incomplete data can be abused by malicious actors. But the answer to bad data is better data, not stupid moral panic about the act of measuring.
Third, the Government cannot complain about Lowe filling a vacuum it helped create. For years, victims were disbelieved, dismissed or treated as inconvenient. Councils failed. Police failed. Social services failed. Governments of both parties failed. If Westminster now finds Lowe’s methods uncomfortable, it might ask why so many victims and campaigners concluded that only discomfort worked.
Still, criticism of Lowe’s method is not defence of the state. The right should be capable of holding both thoughts at once, heroic though that may sound. The Government has been too slow. Lowe’s inquiry may be too loose. Victims deserve neither bureaucratic drift nor crowdfunded improvisation.
Farage was right to argue that Parliament now needs a mechanism with teeth. Not another report to be admired, shelved and solemnly rediscovered in, what, five years’ time? Yes, a serious committee, with powers to compel evidence and real consequences for misleading Parliament, would be a better answer than another round of mournful speeches followed by ministerial drift.
Some supporters on the Conservative right should not be embarrassed to say so. If the last government was too wary on offender data, and it was, then Conservatives should say so, fix it, and move on.
There are moments when the right has to stop behaving like a set of rival estate agents fighting over the same semi-detached. Come on. This should be one of them.
For all the factional noise, much of what was said by Lowe, Reform MPs and Conservative MPs pointed in the same direction. The state failed vulnerable girls. Data on offenders must be collected honestly. Children in care need far stronger protection. Officials who obstructed, minimised or concealed abuse should face consequences.
It is the basic duty of a functioning state.
That does not require Conservatives to outsource the issue to Lowe, Farage or anyone else. It requires us to lead on it.
The grooming gang scandal is too serious for political point scoring. It is also too serious for another state-managed exercise in delay after delay. If we cannot speak clearly about the rape and trafficking of vulnerable children, the failures of corporate parenting, and the need for truthful data, then what exactly are we conserving? The minutes of the last safeguarding failure?
Victims need evidence, prosecutions, proper safeguarding, transparent data and accountability for the adults who failed them.
They were not symbols, slogans or props in someone else’s war.
They were children. And the adults failed them.