Starmer slams Tory leader for past silence on grooming gangs: ‘It’s only in recent days she’s jumped on the bandwagon’
Keir Starmer made a plea to Tory MPs at PMQs to defy Kemi Badenoch’s ‘misleading leadership’ and vote for the children’s wellbeing and schools bill this afternoon.
The Tories are planning to vote down Labour’s bill today in favour of an amendment which would try to force a vote on a national inquiry into child grooming gangs.
Starmer urged the Tory leader to “withdraw her wrecking amendment” to the government’s bill.
The Conservative Party’s push for a new inquiry into grooming gangs, despite failing to implement the recommendations in Professor Alexis Jay’s 2022 inquiry while they were in power, could block Labour’s new child protection legislation.
This is because under Commons rules, an amendment at this stage can stop a bill from progressing.
Starmer said that rather than launching a new inquiry, he thinks “action is what is required”.
He added:“But whatever your view, whatever anyone’s view on whether a further inquiry is needed, what I find shocking is that anyone in this House would vote down the children’s wellbeing Bill this afternoon which is vital protections for the most vulnerable in our society.”
The PM urged Tory MPs to support the bill, stating: “I implore members opposite to defy the misleading leadership of the leader of the opposition and vote for a really important bill.”
He also pointed out that in her eight years as an MP, seven and a half of which were while the Conservative Party was in power: “I can’t recall her once raising this issue in the house, once calling for a national inquiry.”
“It’s only in recent days that she has jumped on the bandwagon.”
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill includes wide-ranging measures to protect children, such as free breakfast clubs, a register for home-schooled children, limits on branded uniforms to reduce costs, and removing forced conversions to academies for underperforming schools.
The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the children’s bill was “the single biggest piece of children safeguarding legislation in a generation” and said the Tories are trying to block it “on the altar of political opportunism”.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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