'Are you saying today that you actually failed in gathering data, [...] and that you did leave stones unturned when you were in government?'
Kemi Badenoch was quizzed over the previous Tory government’s record on grooming gangs at a press conference today.
This morning, Badenoch laid out proposals for a new “alternative grooming gang inquiry”, including draft terms of reference focusing on the ethnicity and religion of perpetrators.
In her speech, the Tory leader said that the government’s national inquiry should leave “no stone unturned”.
But Sky News journalist Jason Farrell pointed out that the Tories had made the same promise to “leave no stone unturned” back in 2018.
Farrell said: “You just said that you didn’t want to leave any stones unturned and those words were used by Sajid Javid back in 2018 when he ordered what you’re calling for, which is a review into the ethnicity of grooming gangs.”
He continued: “That found two years later that most of the perpetrators of group-based sexual abuse were white, but it also found a lack of data.”
Farrell said that at that point, Priti Patel had said the Tory government would improve data gathering.
“Are you saying today that you actually failed in gathering data, improving the gathering of data, that that inquiry was a whitewash and that you did leave stones unturned when you were in government?”, the Sky News reporter asked.
Badenoch responded: “What I’m saying that is despite a lot of work and a lot of effort, there is still more to be done.”
She added: “We are not in government anymore, Labour is in government. So we are asking them to do what we think needs to be done now.”
The Tory leader then started talking about Dr Alexis Jay’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, and how it had “such a wide scope” that it didn’t look into the ethnicity of the perpetrators specifically.
Badenoch said that the Tories set up a grooming gangs taskforce which found 550 perpetrators. She also added that “Even I, who was a minister in government, was learning and discovering the sheer scale of this.”
“We did not know everything we know now, then,” she added.
Responding to the matter of whether the Tories had left stones unturned while they were in power, Badenoch said: “I’m not here to build a time machine and go back in time to see what extra we could have done then. We did what we did.”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
Left Foot Forward doesn't have the backing of big business or billionaires. We rely on the kind and generous support of ordinary people like you.
You can support hard-hitting journalism that holds the right to account, provides a forum for debate among progressives, and covers the stories the rest of the media ignore. Donate today.