Natalie Fleet

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak on this most important issue. I am also grateful to all Members who have contributed with such passion, sensitivity and care for the victims—those brave women—who are with us today, as well as those who are not. At the heart of this debate has been the theme that when women and girls come forward, we must absolutely believe them, and I thank hon. Members for that. I thank the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), who provided a clear and balanced account of the petition’s main arguments. I also thank the petitioners for the role that they have played in bringing us together—including the 598 signatories from Bolsover—and in allowing us to have this cross-party debate with so much consensus. This is my first opportunity to respond to a debate as Minister for Safeguarding, and it is absolutely one of the most important issues that we face as a Parliament. I pay tribute to my predecessor, the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), for her tireless work in supporting victims of these heinous crimes. The grooming gangs scandal is one of the darkest moments in our nation’s history. Every time I meet one of the survivors, I hear the same story. Not only were the girls abused by these predators, but they were ignored, belittled and even blamed. Too many endured years of being told that the crimes against them did not matter, and therefore, they did not matter either. And now, as women seeking truth and justice, there are still those who seek to exploit them with lies and misinformation, spread daily by people claiming to represent the victims’ best interests. We keep seeing too many people who are not interested in victims, but only in themselves. Their lies do nothing but undermine the hard work happening to uncover the answers that survivors have long searched for. I am so proud to be a Minister in the Government who are fighting to get and deliver those answers. My policy responsibilities are broad, but they are connected by a single, sacred thread: the state’s responsibility to keep the most vulnerable in our society safe. There has been a lot of talk about data and evidence, and I will come to that shortly, but first, I will say a word for the victims and survivors of all the different types of abuse that we have been talking about. The testimony that we have heard has been absolutely horrendous, and I thank every Member who has brought it and every victim and survivor who has shared it. We will never forget the terrible suffering that you have endured. That is why I will be part of a team and a Government who will strive relentlessly to prevent others from going through what you have. That will be my focus every single day in this role as we drive forward the Government’s mission to halve violence against women and girls in a decade. To meet that goal, we must tackle all forms of child sexual abuse and exploitation while taking every possible step to protect children from harm. Let me turn to the crux of this debate and the specific points that have been raised. As Members are aware—this has been mentioned often—in February 2025, the Prime Minister and the then Home Secretary commissioned Baroness Louise Casey of Blackstock to evaluate the scale, nature and drivers of group-based sexual exploitation and abuse. The Government immediately accepted the 12 recommendations from Baroness Casey’s audit. That included making it a requirement for police to collect the ethnicity and nationality data of individuals suspected of being members of grooming gangs or perpetrators of other group-based sexual exploitation.