The Prime Minister has suggested Kemi Badenoch did nothing about grooming gangs when the Tories were in power, as a political war of words erupted after a major report in the scandal was published.
Sir Keir Starmer questioned “why on earth” the Conservative leader did not bring forward a mandatory duty for authorities to report child sexual exploitation when she was a minister.
“Why didn’t you do it? Why didn’t you say one word about it?” he added in a message to the Opposition leader, as he spoke to reporters at the G7 summit in Canada.
Sir Keir’s rebuttal came after the Tory leader called a Westminster press conference, where she denied politicising the issue but attacked people who she claimed sought to “tone police those who are pointing out when something has gone wrong”.
The PM also contrasted his time working as England and Wales’ chief prosecutor, and his initial years as an MP when he called for mandatory reporting, with Mrs Badenoch’s time in Government.
“Kemi Badenoch, I think, if I remember rightly, was the minister for children and for women, and I think the record will show that she didn’t raise the question of grooming once when she was in power, not once, not one word from the dispatch box on any of this,” he told reporters.
“Chris Philp (the shadow home secretary), I think, went to 300-plus meetings when he was in his position in the Home Office and at not one of those meetings did he raise the question of grooming.
“So, I know there’s some discussion of this ‘far-right bandwagon’. I was actually calling out politicians, nobody else, politicians who in power had said and done nothing, who are now making the claims that they make.”
Asked if Mrs Badenoch was now weaponising the issue, he said there used to be a time with more cross-party consensus and that the focus should be on individual victims.
“I mean, the question for Kemi Badenoch is, why on earth didn’t you, you were in power, you had all the tools at your disposal.
“I was calling even then for mandatory reporting. Why didn’t you do it? Why didn’t you say one word about it?”
Speaking at the press conference, the Conservative leader earlier 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?”
“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.”
Shadow home secretary Mr Philp 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.
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 for fear of being called racist, and called for “much more robust national data”.
Sir Keir, on Saturday, announced plans to launch a national statutory inquiry into the scandal after accepting the recommendation made in Baroness Casey’s Government-commissioned review.
The Tories have since accused him of U-turning on the issue after the Government resisted pressure from political opponents for months to implement the measure.
Ministers had not ruled out a statutory probe, but previously said their focus was on ensuring the outstanding recommendations of an earlier national inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay had been put in place.
Baroness Casey has said 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 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.”
Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips also told the Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday “I don’t want to hang about” over implementing Baroness Casey’s 12 recommendations and that a figure is being worked up on how much it will cost to carry out the changes.
She also said a national inquiry will not delay reforms from being introduced.
“I will not wait and, and I have to say the department hasn’t waited for findings of an inquiry to be getting on with the work that needs doing,” she said.
“Whether that’s…the task force that leads on this, whether that’s other interventions that we fund in the policing space, or the support space, that those things all go on.”
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.
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.
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