Lord Robathan (Con)

My Lords, I compliment the Minister, unusually, on his balanced approach, which is commendable. I also agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong—again, I do not do so that often—that this should not be a political football. But it has to be said that the Prime Minister, yesterday or the day before, made it a political football by saying that anybody who criticised him was being right-wing. I do not know if the Minister has read the article in the Times today on an interview with Andrew Norfolk, who investigated this scandal and exposed it some dozen years ago. In it he defends the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, when he was DPP, and we should note that absolutely. The article also reports Andrew Norfolk as saying that, “the national inquiry shied away from investigating the causation of grooming gangs, ‘probably for not dissimilar reasons why left-wing academics still attack me … It is very difficult to talk about this stuff without being accused of being Islamophobic’”. He then adds that, “everybody is still too scared”. I do not think we should have a seven-year inquiry but the Government need to focus very much on the idea that the grooming gangs were not generally white English people, as everybody knows. The Government need to look at that closely.