Ferocious political attacks continue to dominate this issuepublished at 18:33 British Summer Time

18:33 BST

Jack Fenwick
Political correspondent

On topics as serious and sensitive as this, Parliament often adopts a critical but polite tone.

Not so today. The political attacks were ferocious. The blame game front and centre.

Kemi Badenoch accused the prime minister of waiting months for someone to make a decision for him.

She said many of the towns where grooming gangs had operated were in Labour-controlled authorities.

Yvette Cooper said the Conservatives failed to implement recommendations made nearly three years ago - and didn't do enough to ensure ethnicity data was collected.

Earlier this year, Keir Starmer accused some of those calling for a national inquiry of “jumping on a bandwagon” and “amplifying” the “far-right”.

His spokesman stood by those comments today and said he was referring to the previous government "who sat in office for years and did nothing".

Meanwhile, Baroness Casey said Badenoch’s speech was an “unedifying sight” - and called on both parties not to make the issue overly political.

Gabriela Pomeroy
Live reporter

A highly-anticipated report has concluded that there's been a "a collective failure to address questions about the ethnicity of grooming gangs" in England and Wales.

Baroness Louise Casey's review, external said the ethnicity of gangs had been "shied away from", for fear of organisations "appearing racist", and is not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.

And while ethnicity data collected for victims and perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation was "not sufficient to allow any conclusions to be drawn at the national level", the report said "there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination". And yet "instead of examination, we have seen obfuscation".

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told the House of Commons she would toughen various laws and listed some of the 12 recommendations Casey's made - all of which the government said it had accepted.

In response, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch accused the government of a huge failure of leadership by not acting sooner.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has already announced that a new national inquiry - one of Casey's recommendations - will take place.

That's it for our live updates of the Casey report into grooming gangs - if you want to keep reading, head to our main news story.

There are fears this could lead to tension in multi-cultural communitiespublished at 18:11 British Summer Time

18:11 BST

Sima Kotecha
Senior UK correspondent

There is a concern among some parliamentarians of Asian heritage that Baroness Louise Casey’s report could "fan the flames to blame entire communities" and provoke racist attitudes.

Labour MP Naz Shah told the House of Commons earlier that "British Muslims stand on the side of victims and support the full force of the law against all perpetrators".

She - and others - have said the perpetrators do not represent all men of south Asian heritage.

Authorities in the past have been clearly keen not to highlight the ethnicity of some of the perpetrators for reasons Casey explains.

I understand some in government are worried today’s report could lead to tension in multi-cultural communities.

• For context: In the report, Casey says that her team struggled to examine "whether there is disproportionality in ethnicity or cultural factors at play in certain types of offending" and instead "found many examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist".

Following that interview with Baroness Casey, who wrote the report, let's remind ourselves of the recommendations she's made to the government - all of which have been accepted.

• Change the law so adults in England and Wales receive mandatory rape charges if they intentionally penetrate the vagina, anus or mouth of a child under 16
• Carry out a national inquiry and police operation
• Review the criminal convictions of victims of child sexual exploitation, quashing any where victims were criminalised instead of protected
• There are a number of recommendations around improving data collection and sharing, among them are making it mandatory to collect data on the ethnicity and nationality data of all suspects in child sexual abuse cases
• Approach child sexual exploitation investigations like serious and organised crime
• Commission research into the drivers for group-based child sexual exploitation, including online offending, cultural factors and the role of the group
• Improve taxi licensing and take immediate action to put a stop to "out of area taxis"

In our earlier post, we summarised the key takeaways from the report in grooming gangs.

Casey says finding gaps in data on grooming gangs was "unbelievably frustrating".

She says she carried out an inspection into Rotherham borough council 10 years ago, and expected "things would have shifted enormously" since then. But instead she found that "nothing has been gripped".

"If you look at the last 10, 15 years, there's been no grip by government," she says. "It's an absolute, classic and sad example of failure of the state on so many levels."

Asked how she felt writing this report, Casey says she is "blisteringly angry about our failure to protect children and to put them first".

"It's been a difficult piece of work to get done, but it was the right thing to do," Casey adds.

Baroness Casey says she didn't think a national inquiry was needed before she started work on her audit into the grooming gangs scandal, since there had been one already.

But it became "absolutely clear" to her that an inquiry was needed due to the "reluctance of local areas to face up to the facts that they didn't treat victims well enough, that they haven't accepted that they have failings".

While working on her audit, Casey says she realised the government has to "grip" the issue, and the way to do that is with statutory powers.

Following the publication of her report, and the home secretary's Commons statement, Louise Casey is now speaking to the BBC.

We'll bring you the key lines from her interview in our next couple of posts, and you can watch along live at the top of the page.

We're continuing to work through Baroness Louise Casey's report and as we do so, here's a brief overview of the key details:

The scale of the problem: The report was "unable to provide an assessment on the scale of group-based child sexual exploitation", and adds: "It is a failure of public policy over many years that there remains such limited, reliable data in this area".

Ethnicity data: The ethnicity of perpetrators is "shied away from" and not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, the report says, adding it was therefore "unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data". The report looked at three parts of the UK where there had been a greater collection of ethnicity data - Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire - and found "there has been a disproportionality of group-based child sexual exploitation offending by men of Asian ethnicity".

Changing consent rules: The report says that despite the age of consent being 16, it found "too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to 15 year old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator". It recommends the law is "tightened up so that an adult having penetrative sex with a child under 16 is rape, no excuses, no defence".

Inquiry and further changes: The report says "there are far too many perpetrators walking freely today who have evaded justice for too long and we should seek to put that right". It recommends a national police operation and national inquiry to hold perpetrators and agencies to account. Also among the 12 recommendations is commissioning research into the "drivers for group-based child sexual exploitation, including online offending, cultural factors and the role of the group".

The home secretary is continuing to take questions from cross-party MPs, following the publication of Baroness Casey's report into grooming gangs and the government's response.

You can watch that debate live at the top of the page, but we're going to step away from the Commons to bring you other updates and analysis on this issue.

If you're interested in reading Casey’s report - in full - you can also now do that. You'll find the near 200-page document here, external.

• As a reminder: In January, Prime Minister Keir Starmer tasked Baroness Casey with reviewing the grooming gangs scandal. As part of it, she's looked into the scale and nature of grooming and considered data on the gangs and their victims, including ethnicity. Ahead of its publication, Starmer announced at the weekend that, having read the report, there would now be a national statutory inquiry into the issue.

A searing indictment of historic state failures, this report will mark a defining momentpublished at 16:17 British Summer Time

16:17 BST

Ben Wright
Political correspondent

This is a searing and shocking indictment of several agencies of the state.

After six months of rage and rows at Westminster about the nature and extent of child sexual abuse and grooming gangs, it’s clear Baroness Casey’s report will mark a defining moment, laying out 15 years of failure to act on numerous reports and recommendations.

It’s also clear that much isn’t known - including a comprehensive picture of the ethnicity of perpetrators.

But if the government’s acceptance of Baroness Casey’s recommendations - including a statutory inquiry - was meant to draw the heat from this row, it hasn't.

Jabbing her finger at the home secretary, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the government had shown a huge failure of leadership by not acting on an inquiry sooner.

Back in the Commons, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has been given the chance to respond to Cooper's statement. Here's what she had to say.

Badenoch thanks Cooper, but says she "couldn't believe [her] ears" while listening to the home secretary speak.

Cooper was speaking "as if this was her plan all along", when we all know it was "another U-turn".

After months of pressure, the PM has "finally accepted our calls" for a full statutory national inquiry, Badenoch says.

This is "not a victory for politicians", she adds. Especially for those like Cooper and Keir Starmer who were "dragged to this position".

"This is a victory for the survivors who have been calling for this for years," Badenoch says.

• For context: A new full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs was announced on Saturday. It comes after the PM read “every single word” of Baroness Casey's report and accepted her recommendation. Earlier this year the government dismissed calls for a national inquiry on the basis that the issue had already been examined in 2022.

We’ve now received the report written by Baroness Louise Casey and being discussed by MPs in the House of Commons.

It's about 200 pages long - we're working through it but here’s some of the key lines we've picked out so far:

• “Child sexual exploitation is horrendous whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination. Instead of examination, we have seen obfuscation,” Baroness Casey says
• She says the ethnicity data collected for victims and perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation “is not sufficient to allow any conclusions to be drawn at the national level”
• But she says that despite the “lack of a full picture in the national data sets”, there is enough evidence in local police data in three police force areas examined “which show disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination”
• Baroness Casey makes 12 recommendations, among them are changing the law “so that an adult having penetrative sex with a child under 16 is rape, no excuses, no defence”
• The report also recommends a national police operation and national inquiry, and reviewing the criminal convictions of victims of child sexual exploitation and quashing any convictions where the government finds victims were criminalised instead of protected

We’ll bring you more shortly as we continue to work through the report.

Now Yvette Cooper has given her statement, we can bring you lines from Dame Louise Casey's report.

She says: "Child sexual exploitation is horrendous whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination.

"Instead of examination, we have seen obfuscation."

She adds: "Our collective failure to address questions about the ethnicity of grooming gangs has dominated political and institutional focus, with energy devoted to proving the point on one hand, or avoiding or playing it down on the other, and still with no definitive answer at the national level."

We'll have more key lines from the report shortly.

Casey's audit looked at local level data in Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire, where high-profile cases involving men of Pakistani heritage have long been investigated and reported, Cooper tells the Commons.

In these areas, they found the suspects of child sexual offences were "disproportionately likely to be Asian men".

While "much more robust national data is needed", Cooper says, "we cannot and must not shy away from these findings".

Cooper then quotes Baroness Casey directly: "Ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities."

The home secretary says Casey's review also identifies prosecutions into perpetrators who were White British, European, African or Middle Eastern - finding all communities were involved in child abuse crime.

She adds that anyone who is found to have abused children "will not be granted asylum to this country".

We're now hearing that Casey's audit found that ethnicity data was not recorded for two thirds of grooming gang perpetrators.

It is not sufficient to support any statements about the ethnicity of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders at the national level, Cooper says.

Cooper says it is "ridiculous and helps no-one" when it is not collected and there have been calls for this for 13 years.

Cooper's confirmed that the government will launch a new criminal operation into grooming gangs overseen by the National Crime Agency.

This will bring together all arms of the police response, "ensuring grooming gangs are always treated as serious and organised crime," she says.

Further inquiries are needed to get accountability in local areas and to hold institutions to account, Cooper says.

Casey reviewed responses from local authorities to consider the best means to get to the truth, she adds. Her report concludes further local investigations are needed, but should be "directed and overseen by a national commission with statutory inquiry powers", Cooper says.

Cooper says the government agrees, and it will "set up a national inquiry to that effect".

Yvette Cooper says there have been 15 years of reports into this - but too little has changed. She adds: "We have lost more than a decade. That must end now."

She also says government will take action on all 12 recommendations laid out by Baroness Casey, by introducing:

• New laws to protect children and support victims
• New major police operations
• A new national inquiry to direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures
• New ethnicity data and research
• New action across children's services to identify those at risk
• Further action to support child victims and tackle new forms of exploitation online
• Change to the law to ensure that adults who engage in penetrative sex with a child under the age of 16 will face the most serious charge of rape

Image source, UK Parliament

Turning to the findings of the most recent report - led by Baroness Louise Casey - Cooper says they are damning.

Casey has found a "deep-rooted failure to treat children as children" and to protect children and teenage girls from rape and "scars that last a lifetime".

There have been deep-rooted institutional failures "stretching back decades", Cooper says. Even good, but misdirected intentions, played a part in this collective failure, she adds.

Cooper then says that in some of the data, there had been an over-representation of suspects of Asian heritage.

Officials often avoided the topic for fear of being labelled racist, Cooper says.

Cooper says she has made clear for months that one of the government's most important task is "to stop perpetrators" - and that "progress is being made, with 800 cases identified for review".

"Rapid action" is under way to implement the recommendations of this latest audit, and previous ones, the home secretary says.

And, as a result, Cooper says the Crime and Policing Bill - still going through the Commons - will see the government introduce a mandatory reporting duty.

There will also be "aggravated offences for grooming offenders" so their sentences match the severity of their crimes, Cooper says.

The home secretary - speaking in the Commons - continues to talk about the context of this audit, from Baroness Casey.

She says sexual assault of children is one of the most heinous crimes, and has caused unimaginable harm.

"It is a stain on our society and a failure of those who were meant to protect them", Cooper goes on to say.

There are calls of "hear hear" in the chamber.

Image source, UK Parliament