Keir Starmer has said he will meet Donald Trump for “one-on-one” talks at a major global summit in a push to get the US-UK trade deal over the finish line, PA Media reports. PA says:

The prime minister said he expected the economic pact to be completed “very soon” ahead of a meeting with the US President at the G7 conference in Canada.

Britain’s long-coveted free trade deal with Washington was agreed upon last month but is yet to be implemented, with both sides yet to take the necessary steps to reduce tariffs.

Asked whether he would be able to finalise the deal as he crosses paths with Trump at the international leaders’ summit in Kananaskis, Starmer said: “I’m very pleased that we made that trade deal, and we’re in the final stages now of implementation, and I expect that to be completed very soon.”

Amid speculation that the two leaders will carve out time for a bilateral meeting between G7 plenary sessions, Starmer said: “I’ll be having a one-on-one with him. I think I’m seeing him on a number of occasions today because we’re in all of the sessions together, so I’ll be having a lot of conversations with President Trump.”

In the Commons Richard Tice, the Reform UK deputy leader, asked Cooper to apologise to people who called for a national inquiry. He alleged they had been smeared by Keir Starmer. (See 12.41pm.)

He also asked if the inquiry would conclude within two years.

Cooper said that the inquiry is expected to take around three years. But it might be able to conclude before then, she said.

As for an apology, she said huge harm had been done to victims. She said the Casey report set out how they were failed over many years. They deserved an apology for that, she said (from the Tories, she implied.)

Here are some extracts from Louise Casey’s audit of the grooming gangs scandal.

On what group-based child sexual exploitation actually involves

Group-based child sexual exploitation’, rare though it may be, is one of the most heinous crimes in our society.

That term ‘group-based child sexual exploitation’ is actually a sanitised version of what it is. I want to set it out in unsanitised terms: we are talking about multiple sexual assaults committed against children by multiple men on multiple occasions; beatings and gang rapes. Girls having to have abortions, contracting sexually transmitted infections, having children removed from them at birth.

When those same girls get older, they face long-term physical and mental health impacts. Sometimes they have criminal convictions for actions they took while under coercion. They have to live with fear and the constant shadow over them of an injustice which has never been righted – the shame of not being believed. And, with a criminal justice system that can re-traumatise them all over again, often over many years. With an overall system that compounds and exacerbates the damage; rarely acknowledges its failures to victims. They never get to see those people who were in positions of power and let them down be held accountable.

On the failure to proper collect ethnicity data

The appalling lack of data on ethnicity in crime recording alone is a major failing over the last decade or more. Questions about ethnicity have been asked but dodged for years. Child sexual exploitation is horrendous whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination.

Instead of examination, we have seen obfuscation. In a vacuum, incomplete and unreliable data is used to suit the ends of those presenting it. The system claims there is an overwhelming problem with White perpetrators when that can’t be proved. This does no one any favours at all, and least of all those in the Asian, Pakistani or Muslim communities who needlessly suffer as those with malicious intent use this obfuscation to sow and spread hatred.

On what the available data does show

We found that the ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data.

Despite the lack of a full picture in the national datasets, there is enough evidence available in local police data in three police force areas which we examined which show disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination.

On what the rape law should be tightened

Despite the age of consent being 16, we have found too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to15 year-old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.

This is due to a ‘grey area’ in the law where, although any sexual activity with 13–15- year-olds is unlawful, the decision on whether to charge, and which offence to charge with, is left more open to interpretation.

The purpose is largely aimed at avoiding criminalising someone who reasonably believed a child was older than they were or criminalising relationships between teenagers. But in practice, this nuance in law is being used to the benefit of much older men who had groomed underage children for sex.

The law should be changed so adult men who groom and have sex with 13–15-yearolds received mandatory charges of rape, mirroring the approach taken in countries like France.

On how a national inquiry should be set up, ‘coordinating a series of targeted local investigations’

Based on findings from the criminal investigation above, and submissions from victims and witnesses, an Independent Commission should review cases of failures or obstruction by statutory services to identify localities where local investigations should be instigated.

There would need to be a process to identify instances and allegations of statutory agencies’ failures, and we recommend that the government develops a list of criteria to determine the types and extent of failures which should be used to assess the triggering of a hearing.

The Independent Commission would set strict timescales and terms of reference for the local investigations which would have a single appointed legal team, with full statutory powers available to them, able to compel witnesses where they refuse to cooperate. Each investigation will call witnesses to give evidence and will require records to be submitted. Local authorities, police forces and other relevant agencies should in the meantime be required not to destroy any relevant records.

The Home Office has published the 197-page text of Louise Casey’s report, National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.

Unusually, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, responded to Cooper, not her Tory shadow, Chris Philp. This is a measure of the importance Badenoch attaches to the issue. Calling for a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal has been one of her main campaign arguments in recent months.

Badenoch claimed that the government was only setting up an inquiry because of the opposition. She said:

I couldn’t believe my ears listening to the home secretary’s statement as if this was their plan all along, when we all know it is another U-turn after months of pressure. The prime minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory National Inquiry into the grooming gangs.

Cooper responded by saying that the Casey report sets out “a timeline of failure” by the previous government. For more than a decade, even when evidence of the problem was available, the last government did nothing about the issues being addressed today, including while Badenoch was minister for children.

UPDATE: Badenoch said:

The prime minister has waited months for someone to take this decision for him. This is the kind of dithering and delay that the survivors complained about.

We need answers to the following questions. The house deserves to know, what changed the prime minister’s mind, from thinking this was dog whistle far-right politics, to something he must do?

And Cooper replied:

I don’t think she can have read this report and the seriousness of its conclusions, because it sets out a timeline of failure from 2009 to 2025.

Repeated reports and recommendations that were not acted on, on child protection, on police investigations, on ethnicity data, on data sharing, on support for victims. For 14 of those 16 years, her party was in government, including years when she was the minister for children and families, then the minister for equalities, covering race and ethnicity issues and violence against women and girls, and I did not hear her raise any of these issues until January of this year.

She will know the prime minister didn’t just raise them. He acted on them, bringing the first prosecutions against grooming gangs, calling for action to address ethnicity issues in 2012. [See 2.35pm.]

I am sorry that she chose not to join in the apology to victims and survivors for decades of failure, that was a cross-party apology in 2022 and it should be again if she really had victims interests and the national interest at heart.

Cooper said the Casey report said police forces were not collecting proper information about the ethnicity of offenders. That was “ridiculous”, she said.

“Frankly, it is ridiculous and helps no one that this basic information is not collected, especially when there have been warnings and recommendations stretching back 13 years.”

Cooper said she had already told police forces to change their recording practices, and the quality of the data is improving.

Baroness Casey’s audit examined local level data in three police force areas – Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire – where high profile cases involving Pakistani heritage men have long been investigated and reported, and there they found the suspects of group-based child sexual offences were disproportionately likely to be Asian men.

She also found indications of disproportionality in serious case reviews.

While much more robust national data is needed, we cannot and must not shy away from these findings because, as Baroness Casey says, ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities.

The vast majority of people in our British, Asian and Pakistani heritage communities continue to be appalled by these terrible crimes and agree that the criminal minority of sick predators and perpetrators in every community must be dealt with robustly by the criminal law.

Cooper said Casey found cases where suspects were asylum seekers.

She went on:

Let me make clear - those who groom children or who commit sexual offences will not be granted asylum in the UK. We will do everything in our power to remove them.

I do not believe the law is strong enough that we have inherited so we are bringing forward a change to the law so that anyone convicted of sexual offences is excluded from the asylum system and denied refugee status.

Cooper said that the government would also implement Casey’s recommendations relating to mandatory information sharing by agencies.

And she said the government would toughen licensing laws for taxis, which have been implicated in many of the scandals.

Cooper says she has accepted Casey’s call for a national commission, with statutory inquiry powers, to oversee the local inquiries into grooming gangs that are already taking place.

But she says Casey is “not recommending another overarching inquiry of the kind conducted by Prof Alexis Jay”, she says.

The inquiry should be time-limited, she says.

Further details of the inquiry will be set out in due course, she says.

Cooper says the Casey report makes 12 recommendations, and the government will act on all of them, she says.

In line with the first recommendation, the government will tighten the law on rape, she says.

Baroness Casey’s first recommendation is we must see children as children. She concludes too many grooming gang cases have been dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges because a 13 to 15 year old is perceived to have been in love with or had consented to sex with the perpetrator.

So we will change the law to ensure that adults who engage in penetrative sex with a child under 16 face the most serious charge of rape, and we will work closely with the CPS and the police to ensure there are safeguards for consensual teenage relationships.

We will change the law so that those convicted for child prostitution offences while their rapists got off scot-free, will have their convictions disregarded and their criminal records expunged.

Cooper goes on:

The audit describes victims as young as 10, often those in care or children with learning or physical disabilities being singled out for grooming precisely because of their vulnerability, perpetrators still walking free because no one joined the dots, or because the law ended up protecting them instead of the victims that they had exploited, deep rooted institutional failures stretching back decades where organisations who should have protected children and punished offenders looked the other way.

She says Louise Casey said “blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions all played a part in this collective failure”.

And, on ethnicity, she says:

[Casey] has found continued failure to gather proper, robust national data, despite concerns being raised going back very many years.

In the local data that the audit examined from three police forces, they identified clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men, and she refers to examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions.

Cooper goes on:

These findings are deeply disturbing, but most disturbing of all, as Baroness Casey makes clear, is the fact that too many of these findings are not new.

As Baroness Casey’s audit sets out, there have been 15 years of reports, reviews, inquiries and investigations into these appalling rapes, exploitation and violent crimes against children, detailed over 17 pages in her report.

Yvette Cooper is speaking now.

She says the sexual exploitation of young girls by gangs is one of the most despicable crimes.

She says in January she asked the police to identify cases closed without action. More than 800 cases have now been identified for review. That figure should rise to more than 1,000, she says.

Rapid action is under way to implement the recommendations of other inquiries, including form Alexis Jay’s inquiry. The government is legislating for a mandatory reporting duty, she says.

And she says Louise Casey was asked to carry out an audit of ethnicity in relation to these crimes – work that had never been done.

The report is “hugely wide-ranging”, she says. The findings are damning.

At their heart is a failure to treat children as children.

The findings of her audit are damning.

At its heart, she identifies a deep rooted failure to treat children as children, a continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation and serious violence and from the scars that last a lifetime.

She finds too much fragmentation in the authorities’ response, too little sharing of information, too much reliance on flawed data, too much denial, too little justice, too many criminals getting off too many victims being let down.

Labour is cutting the farming budget in England by £100m a year, spending review figures show. Helena Horton and Kiran Stacey have the story.

The Scottish government has now published the text of John Swinney’s speech this morning proposing a “national project of renewal”.

The first minister said this would require much greater use of technology in delivering public services. He said:

Public sector, private sector, third sector. National, regional, local. The challenges are many, yes, but the opportunities are more. Working together, let’s be resolute in our belief that we’ve got the necessary knowledge and capacity to transform Scotland’s fortunes.

The task before us is difficult, but entirely achievable.

The challenges are complex, but the tools at our disposal are increasingly sophisticated.

I see first-hand, from my visits to all parts of the country, shining examples of partnership, innovation and success and I know that the first steps on the journey to better have already been taken.

But there is a reality that we must face. We are not going to be able to make the money we have available for public services match the demand for those services unless we ramp up our use of technology.

That requires a near complete digital refit of our public realm.

Above all, systems that are designed to serve the public first. In the NHS, making it easier to manage appointments, making it simpler to access test results, and providing new digital access points to tools designed to support us in healthier living.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has been in Gateshead this morning promoting a £1bn government fund to repair bridges, tunnels and flyovers. In its news release, the Treasury says:

Across Great Britain, approximately 3,000 bridges are currently unable to support the heaviest vehicles, restricting access for agricultural and freight transport in regions, and slowing down journeys.

And nationally, the number of bridge collapses has also risen - a stark reminder of the need for urgent action to turn the tide on the decade of neglect.

The structures fund will inject cash into repairing run down bridges, decaying flyovers and worn out tunnels across Britain, and ensure other transport infrastructure is both more resilient to extreme weather events and to the demands of modern transport - making everyday journeys safer, smoother and more dependable.

And Reeves said:

When it comes to investing in Britain’s renewal, we’re going all in by going up against the painful disruption of closed bridges, crossings and flyovers, and ensure they’re fit to serve working people for decades to come.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the No 10 spokesperson sidestepped questions about whether the government is making plans to evacuate Britons from Israel, in the light of its conflict with Iran.

Asked about this, the spokesperson said:

We, of course, recognise this is a fast-moving situation that has the potential to deteriorate further, quickly and without warning.

That is why we are encouraging British nationals to read the FCDO [Foreign Office] advice on if you’re affected by a crisis abroad. We also advise British nationals to read our advice on how to deal with a crisis overseas.

We are keeping all our advice under constant review and we plan for a variety of developments, as you would expect.

The Foreign Office is advising against all travel to Israel.

Asked if the UK was aware of the reported Israeli plan to kill Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (supposedly vetoed by President Trump), the No 10 spokesperson said he would not comment on private conversations or intelligence matters.

There are three ministerial statements today, on grooming gangs, the Israel/Iran conflict and the Air India crash, in that order. No urgent questions have been announced, and that means Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, will address MPs at 3.30pm. The Louise Casey report into the scale of the grooming gangs scandal will be published around same time.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the No 10 spokesperson said the national inquiry into grooming gangs being set up by the government would “direct and coordinate” local inquiries.

Explaining the reason for the decision, the spokesperson said:

More than a decade ago the prime minister, as DPP, prosecuted the first grooming gang case in Rochdale, and this government is determined to root out these heinous crimes, and that’s why it’s ordered every police force in the land to review historic cases and reopen investigations into grooming gangs.

More than 800 cold cases will now be followed up by the National Crime Agency. The government supported the setting up of new local investigations, it’s begun acting on recommendations from the Jay inquiry into child sexual abuse. The previous government failed to implement a single one. And it has asked Baroness Casey, who led the Rotherham inquiry, to conduct a rapid audit on the scale and nature of grooming gangs across the UK and advise on any further steps that are needed to get to the truth.

The home secretary will obviously set up the government’s full response to Baroness Casey’s audit, which details the most appalling, violent and cruel abuse of young girls. She makes clear that a further national assessment, effectively re-running the Jay inquiry, is not the best way forward, that work to uncover how young girls were failed so badly by different agencies must take place at the local level, which we have always supported.

And she has also identified that a statutory national inquiry is needed to direct and coordinate that work, deciding where independent local investigations take place, and providing the powers to compel witnesses evidence and to get to the truth.

The PM has been clear that the grooming scandal was one of the greatest failures in our country’s history, with vulnerable young people let down time and again, and he is determined to finally get them justice.

Asked if this meant the national element to the inquiry would be limited, the spokesperson said the full details would be given by Yvette Cooper later.

In his interview on the Sky News this morning Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said that Keir Starmer should apologise for saying in January that those calling for a national inquiry into grooming gangs were jumping on a far-right bandwagon. Kemi Badenoch, his party leader, is also quoted today in an Daily Express splash story saying Starmer should apologise, but she is saying he should apologise for not agreeing to hold a national inquiry earlier.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing this morning the No 10 spokesperson was asked if Starmer still thought that people who backed a national inquiry in January were joining a far-right bandwagon. In response, the spokesperson defended the phrase, and insisted that it only applied to Tories who were now demanding an inquiry they never set up when they were in government.

The spokesperson said:

The prime minister’s comments about bandwagons were specifically about ministers from the previous government who sat in office for years and did nothing to tackle this scandal. As the prime minister has said, we will not make the same mistake.

The point the PM has made is that those spreading lies and misinformation were not doing so in the interest of victims. And those cheerleading for Tommy Robinson, who was almost who was jailed for almost collapsing a grooming case, are not interested in justice.

Some of those prominent on social media in January calling for a national inquiry, like the X owner Elon Musk, were also strong Robinson supporters.

The spokesperson also said that there shadow ministers who “did not implement of Alex Jay’s recommendations [when they were in government] but then called for an inquiry when it became politically convenient”.

Philp was referring this morning to something Starmer said at a press conference on 6 January. Starmer said:

When politicians, and I mean politicians who sat in government for many years, are casual about honesty, decency, truth and the rule of law, calling for inquiries because they want to jump on a bandwagon of the far right, that affects politics because a robust debate can only be based on the true facts.

Two days later, at PMQs, Starmer again accused the Tories of jumping on a bandwagon, although on that occasion he did not refer to calls for a national inquiry as being a “far-right” cause.

In his Sky interview Philp was asked why the Tories were criticising Starmer for taking 11 months to order a national inquiry into grooming gangs when the Tories did not order one during their 14 years office. Philp said the previous government had done much in this area, including setting up a general child abuse inquiry, and he said that he was not home secretary in the last government, and Badenoch was not leader. He said he and Badenoch subsequently decided an inquiry was needed.

In a recent report the Commons defence committee said that the armed forces covenant, a legal promise to veterans saying that they should not lose out when accessing government services because of their service in the military, should be extended. It said:

While some people had positive experiences to share, a worrying number [of veterans] felt that the covenant had been ineffective—or worse yet, had been disregarded—when they had cited it. As a result, many continued to face disadvantages as a result of their service in areas like healthcare, education, employment and welfare ….

We welcome the government’s intention to extend the covenant legal duty, which currently requires some public service providers to give due regard to the covenant’s principles when providing certain housing, healthcare and education services. We conclude that this duty should be extended to all central government departments and the devolved administrations, and should cover the breadth of areas in which the Armed Forces community regularly experiences disadvantage.

Today the committee has published the government’s response to this report, which says ministers are accepting this recommendation. Tan Dhesi, the Labour chair of the committee, welcomed the move. He said:

The covenant is a solemn commitment that the servicemen and women who place their lives on the line for us should face no disadvantage due to their service – we need to make sure every part of government lives up to that commitment.

Patients in England will be able to sign up to take part in clinical trials, potentially giving them access to new drugs, more easily under plans announced by the Department of Health and Social Care today. In a news release it says:

Patients will receive the most cutting-edge treatments years earlier than planned under the government’s 10-year health plan, which will speed-up clinical trials so the UK becomes a hotbed of innovation.

Millions of people will now be able to search for and sign up to lifechanging clinical trials, via the NIHR Be Part of Research service on the NHS App, allowing patients to browse and find the trials best suited to their interests and needs.

Eventually the plan will see the NHS App automatically match patients with studies based on their own health data and interests, sending push notifications to your phone about relevant new trials to sign up to.

The 10-year health plan is due to be published soon.

Under the plan, the department also wants to speed up the time it takes to set up a clinical trial. It says:

In recent years, the UK has fallen behind as a global destination for these trials, with patients and the wider economy missing out. It takes around 100 days to set up a trial in Spain, but around 250 days in the NHS. The plan will see commercial clinical trial set-up times fall to 150 days or less by March 2026 - this will be the most ambitious reduction in trial set-up times in British history.

Currently set up processes for clinical trials take too long as a result of unnecessary bureaucracy and duplication of activities across different agencies and sites.

Government will cut set up times for clinical trials. Currently, trials have to agree separate contracts with each part of the NHS they want to be involved. The plan will introduce a national standardised contract which can save months of wasted time, as well as simplifying paperwork to remove duplication on technical assurances.

On the Today programme Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham, said that initially she had been reluctant to support calls for a new inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. But she said she had changed her mind in the light of the public concern about the issue. She explained:

The thought of having another filled me with horror, and I was reluctant, but when I realised the overwhelming public concern, there’s a real sense justice has not been handed out fairly and there has been a cover-up and intense frustration that there are still victims and survivors who haven’t received justice.

Champion said she was happy to use the word “cover-up” because she thought there were people who blocked inquiries into abuse in a way that was, if not criminally negligent, was at least professionally negligent.

I have an intense frustration that, not the frontline staff but further up the management chain, there were people who were actively blocking reports, people who I think, if not held to a criminal standard, should be held to a professional standard for their negligence in protecting those children.

I saw people that would have faced the most criticism have left, took early retirement, changed to a different job and some are having very successful careers, and that’s an intense frustration when, because of their negligence, they have continued to let children be exposed and exploited.

She also said she was delighted by the news that the National Crime Agency is leading a national operation against groominng gangs. She said that the NCA had been operating for seven years in Rotherham on this problem and that she loved their approach. “We have seen them compleltely change the wway that policing is done locally,” she said. She praised them for being “100% victim-focused”.

Ministers have pledged another half a billion pounds for the Lower Thames crossing as part of the government’s 10-year plan for infrastructure, PA Media reports. PA says:

The further £590m – out of the budgets announced at last week’s spending review – will go towards the road crossing that will link Kent and Essex.

A new structures fund will also invest in repairing bridges, flyovers, tunnels and other transport infrastructure such as roads.

The Lower Thames crossing is aimed at reducing congestion on the Dartford Crossing, with a new motorway-style road.

Transport secretary Heidi Alexander has said that the project is “essential for improving the resilience of a key freight route and is critical to our long-term trade with Europe” and that it will “speed up the movement of goods from south-east England to the Midlands and the north, crucial to thousands of jobs and businesses”.

Good morning. All governments have to perform U-turns from time to time and over the weekend Keir Starmer had to stage another, announcing that he would order a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. Although Starmer can argue that he never firmly ruled out an inquiry, and that he is just responding to a recommendation from a short, evidence-based audit of “our understanding of the scale, nature and drivers” of grooming gang abuse conducted by Louise Casey, this is still embarrassing because it is an obvious victory for Kemi Badenoch, Reform UK and Elon Musk (probably the prime mover in this) who were aggressively lobbying for a national inquiry in the new year. Badenoch is now saying Starmer should apologise for not agreeing with her more swiftly. As explained last week, when the opposition has to resort to demanding an apology, that is normally a sign of weakness, not strength, because it means it is running out of proper grievances to pursue. But this remains difficult territory for Labour. The No 10 press operation will be grateful that it has been quite low down the news agenda because of what is happening in the Middle East.

Here is Aletha Adu’s overnight story.

And here is an analysis by Peter Walker, who is with Starmer at the G7 in Canada and who explains how Starmer broke the news about the inquiry in a huddle with reporters on the plane crossing the Atlantic.

And here are the key developments this morning.

• The Home Office has announced that National Crime Agency will lead a national operation against grooming gangs. It says:

The NCA will work in partnership with police forces around the country and specialist officers from the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce, Operation Hydrant – which supports police forces to address all complex and high profile cases of child sexual abuse – and the Tackling Organised Exploitation Programme.

Their job will be to give victims of these horrific crimes, whose cases were not progressed through the criminal justice system, long-awaited justice and prevent more children from being hurt by these vile criminals.

This will build on action already taken by the government to see offenders locked up. Police have already reopened over 800 historic cases of group-based child sexual abuse since the home secretary asked them in January to look again at cases that were closed too early and victims denied justice.

• The Home Office is due to publish the Casey report into the grooming gangs. Casey was asked at the start of the year to “uncover the nature, scale and profile of group based CSEA [child sexual exploitation and abuse] offending”, to provide evidence about the ethnicity of offenders, and to consider “the cultural and societal drivers for this type of offending and the motivations and characteristics of grooming gang offending”.

• Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, has claimed that there could be hundreds of people who deserve to go to jail for covering up grooming gang abuse. In an interview with Sky News defending the need for an inquiry, Philp said:

What I’ve heard in the last few months, meeting retired police officers and meeting survivors, and what has really shocked me, has been the way that this was deliberately covered up over years and possibly decades.

It wasn’t that people were just negligent or just didn’t look into it properly. They deliberately and actively covered it up. I’m talking about senior police officers, local council leaders, social services, the Crown Prosecution Service.

And the reason they deliberately covered it up for years was because the victims were mainly very young white girls, often from troubled backgrounds, from care homes and so on, whereas the perpetrators were mainly of Pakistani heritage. And people in authority at the time were more concerned about so-called race relations than they were about protecting young girls …

There’s a criminal offence called misconduct in public office, and I think those people – and I’m not talking about handful, it is probably dozens or maybe hundreds of people in positions of authority over the years – deliberately covered this up. I think they are guilty of that criminal offence and frankly should be going to prison.

As an example, Philp cited evidence given by John Piekos, a former police office who says that, after he left the force and tried to get the police in West Yorkshire to investigate grooming at a children’s home in Bradford, he was told by a serving police officer and a council official to drop the case.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, gives a speech promising a “national project of renewal”.

Morning: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor (who was also promising renewal in her spending review last week), is on a visit in the north-east of England, promoting plans to improve the road network/

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2.30pm: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 3.30pm: David Lammy, the foreign secretary, and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, are due to make Commons statement, on the Israel/Iran conflict, and the inquiry into grooming gangs respectively. But we are not sure yet which is coming first, and, if the Speaker allows one or more urgent questions, they will come first.

Around 5pm (UK time): Keir Starmer is due to arrive at the G7 meeting in Canada.

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