London, Oldham, Bradford and Keighley named as first focus of grooming gangs inquiry

London, Oldham, Bradford and Keighley will be the first towns and cities investigated by an independent grooming gangs inquiry, it was announced on Wednesday.

The independent inquiry into grooming gangs has confirmed that its three-part hearings will investigate Whitehall departments and politicians alongside local councils, the NHS and national police institutions.

Chaired by Anne Longfield, it will compel individuals and institutions to explain what they “did or did not do to protect children from being sexually abused”, a statement said.

There has been months of lobbying from survivors and campaigners over which areas will be included.

The commissioners have previously said the inquiry will not investigate every area in which grooming gangs operated. More areas will be confirmed as the inquiry sets out phases of its investigation.

According to one former solicitor for grooming gang survivors in Oldham, patterns of abuse were first noticed in the town in the early 2000s. Girls living in care homes, some as young as 12, were abused by groups of predominantly Asian men, it was claimed.

Despite recent demands from the council for an inquiry, the Home Office in late 2024 told Oldham council that it would not launch a statutory inquiry into the town.

The decision prompted Elon Musk, the owner of X, to call for the then safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, to be sent to prison.

Concerns about Asian grooming gangs in Keighley were raised in 2003 by the then Labour MP for the town, Ann Cryer.

A group of concerned mothers alerted her to the problem in her constituency, stating that their young daughters were being sexually exploited by older Asian men. Police and social services were refusing to act, she said.

After going public, Cryer faced accusations that she was a racist and also received threatening notes and phone calls, leading police to install a panic alarm in her house.

Fiona Goddard, who was 14 and living in a children’s home in Bradford when the grooming and abuse began during the late 2000s, said it had been “a long fight”. “Bradford has evaded inquiries for many, many years and it’s time that the full truth about what happened comes out,” she said.

Robbie Moore, the Conservative MP for Keighley and Ilkley, who had called on the government to include Bradford in the inquiry, said the decision marked “a significant turning point”.

The inquiry team said London had been picked in part because it has the highest rate of referrals for child sexual exploitation in the country.

A statement said the inquiry would assess “the wider network of grooming gangs across London’s satellite towns and cities” and that it would “investigate the role of London in the national network of grooming gangs”.

More than 800 recommendations relating to grooming gangs and child sexual exploitation and abuse dating back to the 1990s have been identified by the inquiry. The team said that there had been “significant inconsistency” in how these recommendations have been implemented.

The national accountability hearings in their third phase will investigate tech companies and the “role of technology in the exploitation of children by grooming gangs”.

Longfield, a former children’s commissioner for England, was chosen to lead the inquiry despite demands from some survivors for a judge.

The inquiry was set up after Louise Casey ran a “rapid audit” on gang-based exploitation and recommended that the government establish a national police operation and a national inquiry into group-based child sexual exploitation.

Casey judged that evidence showing the disproportionate representation of men of Asian ethnicity exploiting white teenage girls in some areas “warrants further examination”.

The government accepted all of Casey’s recommendations and committed to establishing a national inquiry.

The first batch of grooming gang cases among the national review of previously closed files has been referred back to police forces where lines of inquiry may have been missed.

Operation Beaconport is examining cases between January 2010 and March 2025 where there are two or more suspects accused of sexual abuse and they are still alive; there is a victim of a sexual offence with physical contact; cases have not already been reviewed; and no further action had been taken.

In November, 1,273 such investigations from 23 police forces had already been referred to the National Crime Agency (NCA), 236 of which were prioritised because they involved allegations of rape.

Beaconport will receive nearly £38m this year, a Home Office statement has said – up from £4m given last year.

But police sources have said the money will “likely fall short” of the amount needed to cover work to tackle group-based child exploitation.

Labour has faced political pressure to tackle grooming gangs, which has become a central campaigning issue for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.