Member

Baroness Casey’s next recommendation is a national criminal investigation. As I have set out, arrests and investigations are rising, but the audit recommends that we go further, so I can announce that the police will launch a new national criminal operation into grooming gangs, overseen by the National Crime Agency. It will bring together for the first time all arms of the policing response and develop a rigorous new national operating model that all forces across the country will be able to adopt, ensuring that grooming gangs are always treated as serious and organised crime, and so that rapists who groom children—whether their crimes were committed decades ago or are still being committed today—can end up behind bars.