Shabana Mahmood on Grooming Gangs

Shabana Mahmood, as the Home Secretary, formally announced the leadership and terms of reference for the Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs in December 2025. She stated that the inquiry is focused specifically on child sexual abuse committed by grooming gangs and will explicitly consider the background of offenders, including their ethnicity and religion, while investigating whether authorities failed to act due to a misplaced desire to protect community cohesion. The inquiry, chaired by Baroness Anne Longfield, is set to be time-limited to three years with a £65 million budget, involving a series of local investigations overseen by a national panel with full statutory powers.

The government's establishment of the inquiry followed Baroness Casey's National Audit, which highlighted systemic failures. Mahmood emphasized that the inquiry must act without fear or favour to identify individual, institutional, and systemic failures, as well as failures of leadership, and that victims and survivors will be placed at the forefront of the work through a dedicated charter. Furthermore, she announced parallel government actions, including commissioning research on perpetrator motivations, legislating for mandated ethnicity data collection from police forces, and changing the law to clarify that children cannot consent to rape by an adult.