Home Secretary accepts recommended changes from chair of Grooming Gangs Inquiry and publishes final terms of reference

Last week, Baroness Longfield and the panel of the Independent Inquiry wrote to the Secretary of State calling on Government to set out a “wider, non-exhaustive” range of statutory services and related organisations that may be scrutinised, “should evidence suggest this is necessary”.

Other recommendations included:

• A strengthened focus on victims and survivors, ensuring their experiences before, during, and after abuse remain central to the Inquiry’s work.
• A more explicit requirement to consider how ethnicity, religion, and culture, both in relation to perpetrators and victims, may have influenced offending patterns, as well as institutional responses.
• A revised historical timeframe, now extending back to January 1996 to ensure appropriate coverage of the last 30 years.

Responding to the recommendations, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said she would accept the recommendations “in full”, adding that the inquiry will be formally established under the Inquiries Act 2005 as of 13 April, when Parliament returns after Easter recess.

She said: “Once established, the Inquiry will have full statutory powers to compel evidence and testimony and is a seminal moment in addressing failures of the past, uncovering the truth and holding institutions and individuals to account.”

The final terms of reference, published today (31 March) states the following under ‘Local investigations’:

“The objective of the local investigations is to identify failures in organisations, systems and procedures, and failures by individual leaders, in protecting children from grooming gangs within local areas, and make recommendations for immediate and longer-term change and improvement where required. For each local inquiry, the Chair and Panel must set out the historic time period which that local inquiry will focus on, in line with the evidence they have received. The nature of the local investigations means that any area may be required by the Inquiry to undertake alternative forms of review and data collection and analysis alongside more formal local investigations in specific areas.

“Specifically, the Inquiry must consider (as decided by the Chair and Panel for each local inquiry):

• the nature, adequacy, and timeliness of statutory service responses (both immediate and long-term) to suspected or confirmed cases of grooming gangs
• missed opportunities for intervention, protection, and effective collaboration
• the response to, and impact on, individuals who reported grooming gang crimes, including victims, survivors, and professionals
• how different risk factors and vulnerabilities played into the abuse or the response to that abuse
• whether ethnicity, religion or culture played a role in the causes and response; and
• the extent to which identified failures have led to changes in practice, policy, or legislation, and whether those changes have been effective.

“In any local area, this may include examination of the actions of the following statutory services and related organisations (as determined by the Chair and Panel; the Chair and Panel may at any time determine that additional statutory services or related organisations should be examined on the basis of new evidence):

• education settings
• youth and community services, including youth offending teams
• religious institutions and organisations
• voluntary or third sector organisations, such as victim support organisations
• multi-agency partnerships, including community safety and local safeguarding partnerships (and their predecessors)
• national and regional safeguarding boards in Wales
• local authorities (including children’s social care, children’s homes, family services, housing services, taxi and private hire vehicle licensing, parks and community cohesion services)
• health services (hospitals, community hospitals, GPs)
• mental health services (including CAMHS)
• sexual health and pregnancy advice services
• police forces
• the wider criminal justice system (including the Crown Prosecution Service)
• educational, health, social care and criminal justice inspectorates
• Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman
• Public Services Ombudsman for Wales.”

The Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs has been established in recognition of the harm experienced by victims and survivors of grooming gangs and the failures of statutory services that were supposed to protect them.

The Inquiry responds to Recommendation 2 of Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (June 2025), which called for a time limited, targeted and proportionate inquiry into cases of failures or obstruction by statutory services in relevant local areas.

Lottie Winson