Early evening summary
Yvette Cooper has condemned damning failures by the authorities to protect children from grooming gangs as she announced there will be a formal requirement on police for the first time to collect ethnicity and nationality data for all cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation. She was speaking in the Commons as the Home Office published a report by Louise Casey assessing what was known about the grooming gangs scandal. At a briefing for reporters, Casey said that failure of the authorities until now to collect good data on the ethnicity of offenders did a “disservice” to the British Pakistani community and could leave them at risk. She said:
I think the continuation of not looking at this data effectively and not collecting the data is in itself a risk. Look what happened in January. You get worldwide attention. You get the far right using that type of situation. So not collecting it is as much a problem if you’re trying to be concerned about society as collecting it.
Asked if she was worried recording the data could lead to civil unrest, the crossbench peer responded:
So let’s put it the other way around. If for a minute you had another report that ducked the issue, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think they’re not going to use that as well? If good people don’t grip difficult issues, in my experience bad people do.
David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has told MPs that all British nationals in Israel should register their presence in the country with the Foreign Office. He said that would mean they could get information on how to leave the country. He also said escalation of the conflict between Israel and Iran “poses real risks for the global economy”.
Updated
Starmer says he will be having one-to-one talk with Trump at G7 summit
Keir Starmer has said he will meet Donald Trump for “one-on-one” talks at a major global summit in a push to get the US-UK trade deal over the finish line, PA Media reports. PA says:
The prime minister said he expected the economic pact to be completed “very soon” ahead of a meeting with the US President at the G7 conference in Canada.
Britain’s long-coveted free trade deal with Washington was agreed upon last month but is yet to be implemented, with both sides yet to take the necessary steps to reduce tariffs.
Asked whether he would be able to finalise the deal as he crosses paths with Trump at the international leaders’ summit in Kananaskis, Starmer said: “I’m very pleased that we made that trade deal, and we’re in the final stages now of implementation, and I expect that to be completed very soon.”
Amid speculation that the two leaders will carve out time for a bilateral meeting between G7 plenary sessions, Starmer said: “I’ll be having a one-on-one with him. I think I’m seeing him on a number of occasions today because we’re in all of the sessions together, so I’ll be having a lot of conversations with President Trump.”
