Contribution
Of course. I want equality before the law. No one, from the most exalted figure in this land to the lowest, should be free from scrutiny, accountability and, ultimately, the full force of the law.
Above all, we should publish this data because it would give the Government of the day incontrovertible evidence and the rationale to make the necessary changes. That would include our immigration system, because, at its heart, our immigration system should have one abiding objective above all others, whether economic or social: it should put the safety of the British people first. If the data shows that men from certain countries are disproportionately likely to commit sexual crimes against young girls here in our country, any responsible Government would suspend visas immediately and design a different system that protects women and girls in this country.
Right now, as we have heard throughout the debate, there is an unwillingness across councils, the police and prosecutions to report and act upon the truth. The facts about crime are covered up because of a toxic combination of bureaucratic inertia and weak leaders who pussyfoot around the truth. They refuse to acknowledge any evidence that contradicts their illusion of Britain as a harmonious, well-integrated country or that confounds their glib statements that diversity is our strength. It is not always the case, as we have seen.
In 2012, an audit by the Children’s Commissioner on grooming found that ethnicity was recorded in 79% of cases. By 2025, Baroness Casey found that ethnicity data was recorded in only a third of cases. More broadly, Ministry of Justice data shows that the police and courts are collecting less data on the ethnicity of criminals, including those who commit child sex abuse, than at any time in the past 15 years, so the problem is getting worse—much worse.
The former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley (Yvette Cooper), ordered officials to publish the nationalities of foreign offenders awaiting deportation. That is obviously welcome, but it is a tiny proportion of the issue, and even that we are still awaiting. The only solution to guarantee transparency is to make public authorities duty-bound by the law of the land to report the truth. So of course we should all support the petition.
But I want to go further. First, we must release the court transcripts—unredacted—and change the entire climate in our criminal justice system, so that court transcripts of any case are easily available to everyone, from journalists to Members of Parliament to campaigners. The current system is unsustainable and completely absurd in an age of AI, when these transcripts could be made available in an affordable way.
Secondly, we need to release every email, memo and record held by central Government, local councils and police forces relating to grooming gangs as soon as possible. How ridiculous that everything being released today—the WhatsApp messages, text messages and so on, which are admittedly about serious errors of judgment and are related to appalling crimes in and of themselves— about the paedophile friend, Peter Mandelson, is attracting this extraordinary furore in the House of Commons Chamber and the media, yet these documents, relating to thousands and thousands of girls in each and every one of our constituencies, are being withheld. Let us get them into the public domain and use transparency to drive change.
Thirdly, we should increase the funding of the National Crime Agency to go after the perpetrators and the public officials who are obviously complicit. Fourthly, we should lock up the perpetrators, with mandatory whole-life sentences. The current sentences handed down to some of these perpetrators are insults to the victims. This is not a new thing, and it is not the fault of this Government; it is a long-standing failure of our criminal justice system. I started, perhaps too late, to pay an interest in this a year or so ago and was stunned at the pathetic short sentences being handed down by judges.
Let me give one example that I came across in Bradford Crown court. A judge handed out a six-and-a-half-year sentence to a man who drugged a 13-year-old girl and then raped her at least twice, queuing up with other men to rape her. The young girl obviously lives with the scars today; in fact, she later became addicted to drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism. Six and a half years for that! Imagine if that was your daughter—or anyone, frankly, in this country. He would probably have been out on licence in four years had the sentence not been increased after I and others referred it to the Attorney General and ultimately the Court of Appeal as unduly lenient. Let us change the law and make these individuals—these vile perpetrators—serve the rest of their lives in prison. That is the least the victims deserve.
Lastly, we should strip citizenship from dual citizens and deport them—deport them far away from these shores. If countries will not take them back, as some do not wish to, why on earth are our constituents paying millions of pounds in foreign aid to those countries? Why on earth is the Home Office issuing thousands of visas to them so that their citizens can come here for business, as students or for pleasure? No! We should use every lever of the British state to get these vile individuals out of our country and protect our women and girls.
None of those things will be enough for the victims, whose childhoods were stolen from them and for whom the scarring will never fade. What possibly could be? But this proposal will move us a step closer to correcting this injustice and, above all, to preventing future ones.