Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced there will be a national inquiry into grooming gangs, a policy Keir Starmer now supports – even though he said in January that Conservative MPs supporting an inquiry were “jumping on the bandwagon of the far-Right”.
But Sir Keir refused to apologise today. Asked if he should say sorry, he told our reporter in Canada: “Grooming is a vile offense, absolutely vile. And I brought the first prosecution when I was chief prosecutor, really 15 years ago now. So I’ve seen the impact directly on victims.
“There have been a number of inquiries with very many recommendations. I took the view that we should implement those recommendations because they’ve been sitting on a shelf.
“Vitally important we do for things like mandatory reporting that we’ve already brought into place. But as a safeguard, I asked Louise Casey to look again to an audit to see if there’s anything that had been missed.
“She’s carried out that audit. She’s presented that to me. I’ve read it in full, and on the basis of what she’s found, she says there should be a National Inquiry.
“I’ve looked at her report, I’ve considered that material. I think she’s right, and that’s why it’ll be a National Inquiry. It’ll be a statutory inquiry. It’ll go wherever it needs to go.”