The news emerged in a notably low-key way: a speculative question to Keir Starmer during his Q&A with reporters on the way to the G7 summit in Canada. Yes, he said, speaking carefully while wedged in the aisle of the cramped jet, there would be a full statutory inquiry into grooming gangs.
This was, it should be remembered, not just one of the most toxic debates in British politics during 2025, but one where Starmer and his ministers had continually pushed back against demands for such an action.
So why now? At first sight this might seem similar to the recent U-turn over eligibility for pensioners’ winter fuel allowance – a belated acknowledgment that the original decision had been mistaken, masked by words about circumstances changing.
But in this instance things are arguably more nuanced, despite the notably furious reactions from Kemi Badenoch and the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, who were swift to accuse the prime minister of delay without reason.
It is worth remembering that the scandal and the official response to it is not a new issue, and that demands for a new inquiry coincided squarely with Elon Musk, the billionaire X owner, taking a sudden interest in the subject.
By the time Musk started posting furiously and often misleadingly about the subject, leaning heavily into the ideas of the British far right anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson, ministers were still pondering how to implement the recommendations of an existing inquiry completed by Prof Alexis Jay in 2022.
The government found itself buffeted by a suddenly brutal media and political landscape, punctuated by grim vignettes like Musk calling Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister who has perhaps done more to combat violence against women than any other serving Westminster MP, a “rape genocide apologist”.
The Conservatives and Reform UK then demanded a fuller national investigation into the phenomenon of the sexual abuse gangs that sprung up around the night-time economies of a series of towns, with many of the offenders being of Pakistani heritage.
No 10’s initial instinct was to hunker down and argue that the best action was to act on Jay’s recommendations. But within a few weeks this began to shift and the government announced that the crossbench peer and safeguarding expert Louise Casey would conduct a review of the grooming gang evidence based on smaller local inquiries, without the statutory abilities to compel witnesses to give evidence.
Casey has now completed her review and, as Starmer set out on the plane, recommended a full national inquiry, which will be set up.
So this is perhaps less a U-turn than the consequences of January’s earlier U-turn, and in truth given Casey had called for a national inquiry, it would have been extremely difficult for the government to push back against this.
This will not, however, completely quell the political anger over the subject. The formal Home Office announcement of the inquiry implicitly acknowledges this, also setting out plans for the National Crime Agency to work with local police forces to try to prosecute grooming gang cases that happened years ago.
Some critics of Starmer, Philp among them, also remain angry that, as they claim, he described supporters of a new inquiry as “far right” when the PM hit out against Musk in January. This is an over-interpretation of Starmer’s actual comments, who went no further than saying they were “amplifying” some far-right demands.
But, as shown by the court verdict last week in which seven men who groomed two vulnerable teenage girls in Rochdale from 2001 and 2006 were belatedly convicted, this is not an issue that is about to go away. The hope must be that, at the very least, the new inquiry helps replace some of the invective with facts.
