Nationwide police operation on grooming gangs announced

A nationwide police operation to track down those in grooming gangs has been announced by the Home Office.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) will target those who have sexually exploited children as part of a grooming gang, and will investigate cases that were not previously progressed. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said in a statement: "The vulnerable young girls who suffered unimaginable abuse at the hands of groups of adult men have now grown into brave women who are rightly demanding justice for what they went through when they were just children.

"Not enough people listened to them then. That was wrong and unforgivable.

We are changing that now. "More than 800 grooming gang cases have already been identified by police after I asked them to look again at cases which had closed too early.

"Now we are asking the National Crime Agency to lead a major nationwide operation to track down more perpetrators and bring them to justice." The NCA will work in partnership with police forces around the country and specialist officers from the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce, Operation Hydrant - which supports police forces to address all complex and high-profile cases of child sexual abuse - and the Tackling Organised Exploitation Programme. It comes after Sir Keir Starmer announced a national inquiry into child sex abuse on Saturday, ahead of the release of a government-requested audit into the scale of grooming gangs across the country, which concluded a nationwide probe was necessary.

The prime minister previously argued a national inquiry was not necessary, but changed his view following an audit into group-based child sexual abuse led by Baroness Casey, set to be published next week. Ms Cooper is set to address parliament on Monday about the findings of the near 200-page report, which is expected to warn that white British girls were "institutionally ignored for fear of racism".

One person familiar with the report said it details the institutional failures in treating young girls and cites a decade of lost action from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), set up in 2014 to investigate grooming gangs in Rotherham. The report is also expected to link illegal immigration with the exploitation of young girls.

Read more:Telford child abuse victims speak outWhat we know about grooming gangs, from the dataThe women who blew whistle on Rotherham Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, said on Saturday that Sir Keir should recognise "he made a mistake and apologise for six wasted months". Speaking to Sky's Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips, Chancellor Rachel Reeves refused to say if the government will apologise for dismissing calls for a national public inquiry into grooming gangs.

She said: "What is the most important thing here? It is the victims, and it's not people's hurt feelings about how they have been spoken about.".