Hornchurch And Upminster MP Calls For Justice For Victims Of Rape Gangs.

News from Julia Lopez-the Member of Parliament for Hornchurch and Upminster.

Last night, my fellow Conservative MPs and I voted for a full national statutory inquiry into rape gangs.

Sadly, the Government and the Labour Party voted against one, despite the Prime Minister calling for nine inquiries when he was Leader of the Opposition.

They spent yesterday telling everyone that our amendment would wreck new laws to protect children, but the Prime Minister didn’t even vote last night – so he cannot have been too worried.

He also said it would delay action to help victims, but we believe governments can do two things at once.

If you agree, sign the petition demanding a full inquiry – https://DemandAnInquiryNow.com

This is one of the largest scandals in UK history, with thousands of young girls failed time after time by multiple agencies and organisations.

The problem is systemic and only a full national inquiry – not a patchwork of local inquiries, which Labour recommends – is capable of getting to the bottom of the issue because it would compel witnesses to attend and give evidence under oath.

We know that some councils are refusing to hold inquiries and that in Manchester, investigators have not been given the evidence they have requested.

It’s been suggested the last government didn’t do anything – not true.

We established inquiries into child sexual abuse and exploitation, but those inquiries were limited either by geography (Rotherham) or by focusing on other types of abuse (the wide-ranging IICSA inquiry by Baroness Jay that looked at abuse in the church, by sports coaches and by high profile individuals, with a lesser focus on so-called grooming gangs).

We now fear this type of despicable crime is present in fifty towns.

Andrew Norfolk, the Times journalist who first revealed abuse in 2011, said that a lot changed for the better after his reports – ‘priorities, budgets and training have all changed massively’.

We had accepted 18 out of 20 recommendations from the IICSA inquiry and were implementing them. But those recommendations were not designed to tackle some of the patterns specific to rape gang activity.

As Mr Norfolk has said, ‘the national inquiry did not get to grips with the root causes of grooming gangs specifically because the concerns over racism and cultural sensitivities meant that causation was never examined’.

This is one of the reasons why, after IICSA, Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister and Suella Braverman when Home Secretary set up the Grooming Gangs Taskforce in 2023.

In just one year, with the expertise of the National Crime Agency, that Taskforce led to the arrest of 550 people and protected 4000 children. But its work also demonstrated the extent of the ongoing problem and highlighted the patchwork approach that we had seen before is simply not enough.

That is why Kemi Badenoch, as Leader of the Opposition, talked about grooming gangs in her Conference Speech last year – and the moral imperative for us not to be afraid when tackling these issues.

This is why the campaign continues. I sincerely hope the Government will re-think its position on this deeply important matter.

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