Tories’ push for new grooming inquiry would ‘kill’ child safety bill, says Phillipson

Bridget Phillipson said the government was ‘looking right across the recommendations’ set out in Prof Alexis Jay’s independent review. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

The Conservatives’ push for a new national grooming inquiry that would block the child safety bill is “absolutely sickening”, Bridget Phillipson has said.

The education secretary said the opposition party’s plan to amend the government’s children wellbeing and schools bill on Wednesday, which she called the “single biggest piece of children safeguarding legislation in a generation”, would “kill it stone dead”.