Kemi Badenoch has insisted she is not politicising the grooming gangs scandal after the author of a major review on the issue said she was “disappointed” with the Opposition’s approach.
Speaking at a press conference alongside grooming gang survivors and campaigners, the Conservative leader said was “not doing politics now”, but criticised people who sought to “tone police those who are pointing out when something has gone wrong”.
She said: “I do think that we should take the politics out of it. But who was it that said when we raised this issue that we were pandering to the far right? That’s what brought the politics into it.”
Her comments follow an interview in which Baroness Louise Casey told the BBC she was “disappointed” by the Opposition’s response to her review of the grooming gangs scandal.
She said: “We need to change some laws, we need to do a national criminal investigation, we need to get on with a national inquiry with local footprint in it and ideally wouldn’t it be great if everybody came behind that and backed you?”
She added: “I felt the Opposition could have just been a bit, you know, yes we will all come together behind you.
“Maybe there’s still time to do that. I think it’s just so important that they do.”
Mrs Badenoch said her party did back a national inquiry into the scandal, and had been calling for one “for six months”.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp, who also spoke at Tuesday’s press conference, called for “the people who are responsible for covering this up” to face prosecution for misconduct in public office alongside the inquiry.
He said the Conservatives wanted the inquiry to take two years, focus on “all 50 towns affected” and “look at the role of ethnicity in the cover-up”.
But appearing in front of the Commons Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday morning, Baroness Casey urged people to “keep calm” on the subject of ethnicity.
Pointing out that her report had said data on the ethnicity of perpetrators was “incomplete and unreliable”, she said: “If you look at the data on child sexual exploitation, suspects and offenders, it’s disproportionately Asian heritage.
“If you look at the data for child abuse, it is not disproportionate, and it is white men.
“So again, just (a) note to everybody really, outside here rather than in here, let’s just keep calm here about how you interrogate data and what you draw from it.”
Baroness Casey’s report, published on Monday, found the ethnicity of perpetrators had been “shied away from”, with data not recorded for two-thirds of offenders.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told MPs that officials had dodged the issue of ethnicity among groups of sex offenders for fear of being called racist, and called for “much more robust national data”.
Baroness Casey also told the Home Affairs Committee that a national inquiry should be done within three years, rather than the two called for by the Conservatives.
She believed three years would be “achievable” to carry out the national and local inquiries.
The crossbench peer also urged for local areas to “think carefully” about not being open to scrutiny and to change.
On the five local inquiries announced in January, she said “only Oldham bit the bullet”, adding: “My understanding is nobody else volunteered for that. So that tells you something, doesn’t it? It tells you something, and it doesn’t tell you something I certainly would want to hear if I was a victim.”
A Downing Street spokesman said the format and chairperson of the inquiry would be set out at a later date, adding that it would have the power to compel people to give evidence.
The spokesman said: “We want to get on with this, but we must take the time to sort out exactly how that works and get the process right.
“But to be absolutely clear, the grooming scandal was one of the greatest failures in our country’s history, with vulnerable people let down time and again, and the Prime Minister is determined to finally get them justice.”
He added that the Government had accepted all of Baroness Casey’s recommendations, including making it mandatory for the police to collect data on the ethnicity of suspects.
