On Tuesday 2 September, the House of Commons heard a statement from Labour MP Jess Phillips on the status of a new statutory national inquiry into group-based child sexual exploitation, more commonly referred to as ‘grooming gangs’. The inquiry is one among twelve courses of action recommended by baroness Casey in her audit of the issue. The report was published before the summer recess, and all twelve recommendations have now been accepted by the government. However, one absence – or, rather, set of absences – was notable for the Commons statement. Not a single Reform MP turned up to hear it.

Operation Beaconport

Phillips opened with a 12-minute report of the the government’s recent actions on the case. This included the “laying the foundations” for the national enquiry, and establishing a dedicated national policing operation.

This police operation will be known as ‘Beaconport’, and will be overseen by the National Crime Agency. It brings together the the Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) taskforce, the National Police Chiefs’ Council, and the tackling organised exploitation programme. Phillips announced:

For the very first time, this new national policing operation brings together all the relevant policing partners under one operation, to ensure a swift and specialist law enforcement response to grooming gang offending. This collaborative approach ensures that a long-term investigative capability is built across policing and that best practice is standard, ending an unacceptable postcode lottery for victims and survivors.

Then, in evidence of the efficacy of the new taskforce, Phillips also rattled off a series of statistics. Arrests are up, and Labour is pumping over £400k extra into the programme:

I can announce to the House today that in the first year that this Government were in office, from July 2024 to July 2025, the taskforce contributed to 827 arrests nationwide, an 11% increase on the previous year.

To bolster this vital work, I can update the House that last month I announced that the Government would be injecting £426,000 of new funding to the tackling organised exploitation programme, in addition to the £8.8 million that we are already investing in the programme this year.

The Conservative MPs in attendance were keen to hammer on the notion of a ‘cover up’ of the issue of CSA. Beyond this, a lot of there responses addressed the idea that Labour is being inactive or dragging its heels. However, Phillips was quick to remind the Commons that no evidence of such a cover-up had been found:

If people are found by our court system to have undermined and disgraced public office, they should of course be sent to prison. However, that has never happened to date in these cases. I very much hope that we uncover the kind of social workers that the right hon. Gentleman refers to, and I hope that they face the full force of everything that they deserve to face, but there is absolutely nothing that says that anybody can avoid this inquiry.

And where is Reform?

Not a single Reform UK MP chose to attend for Phillip’s statement. Of course, this is somewhat par for the course for the far-right party. Farage himself has a notably terrible Commons attendance record. But the lack of Reform MPs at yesterday’s statement is particularly egregious for one simple reason – they were one of the parties who repeatedly insisted on the creation of a national enquiry in the first place.

According to YouGov polling, Farage is the party leader that voters trust the most on the issue of group-based CSE. However, even in Farage’s case this wasn’t exactly a vote of confidence:

There is likewise limited trust in party leaders on child grooming, with only 26% having confidence in Nigel Farage, 22% for Keir Starmer and 18% Kemi Badenoch. This represents a four-point decline for the prime minister since our previous poll in January, while the numbers for his right wing counterparts remain unchanged.

Likewise, the same polling results showed that – despite a lack of hard evidence – Reform voters are the most likely to believe claims about the ethnicity of the perpetrators:

Reform UK voters are the most likely to believe that the majority of grooming gang offenders are Asian (46%), making them the only group for whom this was the most common answer.

This mirrors claims made by Farage himself, stating that that the gangs involved are “predominantly of Pakistani origin”. So, if he and his party members can’t even be bothered to turn up to hear about the status of an enquiry that they insisted on so vocally, we’ve got to ask – do Reform voters really not care about what their elected officials actually do, so long as they join them in pointing the finger at brown men?

Featured image via the Canary