Early evening summary
Yvette Cooper has announced an urgent national review of the scale of grooming gangs as part of a range of new measures to tackle the issue, following sustained political pressure. She also said in a Commons statement the Home Office would fund more local inquiries, starting in Telford and four other towns, (See 3.28pm.) The Tories claimed this was a “totally inadequate” response to public concern about grooming gangs, but Labour MPs who have been campaigning on this issue were generally positive. However one of those MPs, Sarah Champion said that she was concerned that the local inquiries would not have the power of a statutory national inquiry, which can compel witnesses to give evidence, and that the extra £5m set aside for these local inquiries would not be enough, given the Telford inquiry alone cost £8m. Champion also asked Cooper for an assurance that the government would be adopting all the 20 recommendations in the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA) report published in 2022. Cooper said a timetable for addressing the recommendations would be set out before Easter, but she said some of them raised “complex issues” or would require “considerable work”. It has been reported that the IICSA compensation scheme proposal would cost around £7bn. Commenting on Cooper’s reply, Richard Scorer, who represented more than 100 victims at the inquiry as head of abuse law and public inquiries at Slater and Gordon, said:
Last week the government promised that it would implement all the key recommendations of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. Today in parliament the home secretary was pressed by Sarah Champion MP to confirm that all the recommendations would be implemented. In response, the home secretary failed to give a clear and categorical assurance . We are very concerned that the government is backing down on its commitment to full implementation . Any delay or failure to implement IICSA in full is unacceptable and a betrayal of survivors.
Kemi Badenoch has said the UK is getting poorer and people should be honest that it is failing to compete with the rest of the world. She made the claim in a speech in which she was more critical than she has been in the past about Tory failings over Brexit policy. But, taking questions from journalists, Badenoch played down the case for apologising for her party’s record. (See 2.45pm.) The Conservative leader also surprised journalists by saying Rachel Reeves was a “woman problem” for Keir Starmer. (See 4.08pm.) For an analysis of the speech, see 11.45am and 3.01pm.
Updated
Kemi Badenoch ended her speech today with the line:
We are under new leadership, we are back in the service of the British people, and we are going to give you your country back.
Commenting on Bluesky, my colleague Jessica Elgot says;
Quite interesting that this is basically an amalgamation of Labour and Reform UK’s slogans
