Two leading candidates to chair grooming gangs inquiry revealed

A former police officer and a social worker are the leading candidates to chair the government's national inquiry into grooming gangs, Sky News has learned.

The two prospective candidates, Jim Gamble and Annie Hudson, are due to meet a survivors' panel on Tuesday. That group will then pass on their reflections of the candidates to the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to decide who leads the inquiry.

The prime minister launched the inquiry into grooming gangs after an audit by Baroness Louise Casey showed the scale of the problem. Some victims have already expressed concern that the two candidates' backgrounds in policing and social work might lead to conflicts of interest.

"These are exactly the institutions that let us down," said one campaigner. Others want the inquiry to be judge-led, including shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, who believes the chair should have "deep experience" of criminal cases.

However, both candidates have had careers tackling child abuse, and Mr Gamble has on several occasions challenged police and other institutions over child protection failures. He began his career as a police officer in Northern Ireland, rising to become head of RUC special branch in Belfast, but is best known for his work combating child abuse.

In 2006, he headed up the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which revolutionised the approach to policing online child abuse networks. Its investigations are said to have led to more than 1,000 arrests before Mr Gamble resigned in 2010 when the then Home Secretary Theresa May decided to merge his unit with other departments.

He also headed up Operation Ore, the UK's largest ever police investigation into who was viewing internet child abuse images. It identified more than 7,000 suspects and led to more than 2,000 convictions.

In 2021, he examined evidence gathered by Sky News into an Asian grooming gang in Humberside and was critical of the police investigation, calling on forces to treat group-based child abuse "as seriously as we treat terrorism". He added: "This is organised, industrial-level rape." In 2022, he led an independent inquiry into the strip-search of a black schoolgirl in Hackney known as "Child Q.