24 June 2026
London, Oldham, Bradford and Keighley will be the first areas investigated by a national inquiry into grooming gangs.
The £65million probe is investigating how the grooming gangs operated and how public institutions including the police, councils, health services, social care services and schools responded.
Today’s announcement confirms which areas will first face so-called local investigations – where serious failures have been identified in response to child sexual exploitation by grooming gangs.
Former children’s commissioner for England Anne Longfield is heading up the inquiry, which has the legal powers to compel witnesses to give evidence and requires organisations to hand over documents.
Any evidence of crimes uncovered will be referred to Operation Beaconport, the national police operation launched last year to review hundreds of previously closed investigations.
Baroness Longfield said: ‘The inquiry’s task is to find out why this catastrophic failure of the state happened and continues to happen, to establish why victims and survivors of abuse were failed, and to hold to account those institutions and individuals who failed them. Our national accountability hearings will begin before the end of the year.
‘There have been many inquiries and reviews into grooming gangs and child sexual exploitation and abuse over the past 20 years, putting forward more than 800 recommendations, many of which have not been implemented.
‘These hearings will help us to establish what national institutions and services should have been doing to implement these findings and to protect children from abuse and harm – and what, if any, progress has been made in areas where investigations have taken place.
‘We are determined that our work ensures that no further inquiries into grooming gangs will ever be needed.’
Baroness Anne Longfield, a former children’s commissioner for England, is chairing the inquiry
Baroness Longfield has vowed to hold police forces who failed to investigate grooming gangs accountable, as well as the council workers accused of covering them up.
‘Any evidence’ of criminal conduct by professionals will be referred to a specially launched national operation to review hundreds of previously closed investigations, she said.
In its terms of reference published in March, the inquiry said it would ‘investigate how grooming gangs operated and how institutions, including police, local authorities, health services, social care services, and schools, responded to abuse’.
The inquiry, which is set to conclude no later than March 2029, ‘will examine why children were so often disbelieved, dismissed, or blamed for their own abuse’.
It added: ‘The inquiry will directly examine whether the ethnicity, culture or religion of either perpetrators or victims influenced patterns of offending, and whether these factors shaped the institutional response.
‘These are questions that previous reviews chose not to address. This inquiry will not avoid them.’
But the solicitors representing victims of child sex grooming and the survivors remain unhappy about the scope of the inquiry – which is currently limited to just five areas.
And Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham, who first called for action on grooming gangs, has criticised the amount of time the inquiry has taken to get going and believes its budget would be better spent on supporting the National Crime Agency bringing gangs to justice.
One lawyer, David Greenwood, said he was ‘very concerned’ the ‘Labour-run Home Office’ will be able to influence which locations are examined and fears there could be ‘perceptions of bias’.
Meanwhile, Rotherham abuse survivor and campaigner Sammy Woodhouse said it should be widened to a much wider geographical scale, as grooming was going on in ‘every town, every city’.
Rotherham abuse survivor and campaigner Sammy Woodhouse is unhappy just five places will be scrutinised by the inquiry
Ms Woodhouse also criticised the time limit of 1996, when high-profile abuse cases were going on many years earlier, and the inquiry not interviewing victims’ parents as part of the process.
Zoe Billingham CBE, a panelist for the Inquiry, today promised to announced further local investigations in due course.
‘We will continue to follow the evidence wherever it leads, gathering and analysing evidence from across England and Wales, including from areas not yet selected for a local investigation,’ she said.
‘We will be forensic in examining what happened in these areas – how institutions responded, why children were not protected, and why opportunities to prevent harm were missed.
‘We will look at what was known, how decisions were made, and why earlier action that could have protected children did not happen. We will look at the role culture, ethnicity and religion may have played in the decisions that were taken, and whether some in authority were too squeamish to act.’
The Inquiry risks being hampered by gaps in evidence, with MPs fearing some records could have been destroyed because of ‘staggering’ Home Office delays in ordering them to be preserved.
Dame Karen Bradley, chair of the home affairs select committee, wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in March to ask why the Home Office took seven months to tell councils, police and other agencies to retain material relating to the gangs.
Last June, Baroness Casey of Blackstock’s national audit on grooming gangs called for the Home Office to formally require relevant agencies to preserve their records.
But the department did not start making these requests until January 14.
‘The failure to provide timely direction to local authorities, police forces and other relevant agencies about the need to retain relevant documents means that some records which may be relevant to the independent inquiry into grooming gangs might have been destroyed,’ Dame Karen told Ms Mahmood.
‘What assessment has the Home Office made of the consequences – including for possible future legal action – of not directing local authorities, police forces and other relevant agencies not to destroy records which may be relevant to the independent inquiry into grooming gangs?’