The Home Secretary made a statement to the House of Commons - Hansard 16 June 2025
Baroness Casey gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on 17 June 2025 - see HERE.
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12 recommendations
Casey made 12 recommendations and
those were made on the basis that the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse recommendations are being implemented. In the House of Commons, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper MP said that action would be taken on all of Casey's recommendations.Casey's report notes that, in implementing the recommendations, there is scope to consider reconfiguration and greater rationalisation of policing and other organisations and capabilities that play a part in tackling group-based child sexual exploitation.
Other areas
The Home Secretary also referred to three important issues identified by Baroness Casey, but on which she did not make specific recommendations:
- Victim Support,
- Cases involving suspects who were asylum seekers - change the law so that anyone convicted of sexual offences is excluded from the asylum system and denied refugee status,
- Changing patterns of 'grooming gang child sexual exploitation'
An Inquiry / Independent Commission
The precise FORM the inquiry will take remains to be seen in detail but it is interesting to look more closely at Recommendation 2 in the light of the fact that a number of local inquiries are planned. Casey's report refers to two steps:
Step 1 - A national criminal investigation
A police operations to prosecute perpetrators should be 'scoped and planned in detail' by the Home Office, with the National Crime Agency (NCA) and National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC). The NCA would oversee delivery of this operation.
Step 2 - A national inquiry co-ordinating a series of targeted local investigations
A first point here is that the reference to "national" may prove to be inaccurate. The Home Secretary recognised during the debate that devolved administrations would be consulted and would be able to decide their own action.
Having used the word Inquiry, Casey's report then refers to an independent Commission with full statutory inquiry powers. This would be 'time limited, targeted and proportionate to the numbers of victims.' In answer to a question from Richard Tice MP, the Home Secretary said that the envisaged timescale was about 3 years.
The exact detail of this proposal remains to be fleshed out but it appears to be a mechanism by which local inquiries can, if necessary, have access to inquiry powers given that local inquiries do not have such powers themselves. Questions will require answers such as who will be the Chair, whether there will be a panel rather than a single chair, the terms of reference.
Inquiries Act 2005
It appears that the Inquiries Act 2005 will apply to the proposed Commission / Inquiry. The Act gives an Inquiry Chair power to require production of evidence etc (section 21) but actual enforcement is a matter for the High Court (section 36). Remember the story of Boris Johnson's mobile phone? See BBC.
Age of Consent
See Chapter 8 of the Casey Report. The Chapter begins with a helpful summary -
Despite the age of consent being 16, we have found too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13-15 year old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.
• This is due to a ‘grey area’ in the law where, although any sexual activity with 13–15-year-olds is unlawful, the decision on whether to charge, and which offence to charge with, is left more open to interpretation.
• The intention behind this is largely aimed at avoiding criminalising someone who reasonably believed a child was older than they were or criminalising relationships between teenagers.
• In practice, this nuance in law is being used to the benefit of much older men who had groomed vulnerable children for sex.
• The law should be changed so adult men who groom and have sex with 13–15-year-olds receive mandatory charges of rape, mirroring the approach taken in countries such as France
Current CPS Guidance on Consent
R v Sean Robinson [2011] EWCA 916
Refugees
See the government's announcement in April - Sex offenders to be stripped of refugee protections -Foreign nationals who commit sex offences will be excluded from asylum protections in the UK as part of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill.
UK Government January 2025 - Revocation of Protection status
*** Casey's 12 Recommendations ***
Recommendation 1: The law in England and Wales should be changed so
adults who intentionally penetrate the vagina, anus or mouth of a child under
16 receive mandatory charges of rape.
Recommendation 2: A national police operation and national inquiry, co-
ordinating a series of targeted investigations should be launched into child
sexual exploitation in England and Wales.
Recommendation 3: Review the criminal convictions of victims of child sexual
exploitation. Quash any convictions where the government finds victims were
criminalised instead of protected.
Recommendation 4: The government should make mandatory the collection of
ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and
criminal exploitation cases and work with the police to improve the collection
of ethnicity data for victims.
Recommendation 5: Mandatory sharing of information should be enforced
between all statutory safeguarding partners in cases of child sexual abuse and
exploitation. Compliance should be monitored by the inspectorates and
overseen by the proposed Child Protection Authority.
Recommendation 6: The Department for Education should move swiftly to
introduce unique reference numbers for children to improve opportunities for
agencies to better share their information about children at risk of child sexual
abuse.
Recommendation 7: Police information systems should be upgraded. These
systems should also provide for the use of the unique reference numbers for
children which are being introduced by the Department for Education.
Recommendation 8: Child Sexual Exploitation investigations should be
approached like Serious and Organised Crime
Recommendation 9: The Department for Education should urgently interrogate
child protection data to identify the causes of the decline in child sexual abuse
and exploitation representation in child in need assessment data; examine the
reasons for variations across local authorities; and review the effectiveness of
Serious Incident Notifications in relation to child sexual abuse and
exploitation.
Recommendation 10: The government should commission research into the
drivers for group-based child sexual exploitation, including online offending,
cultural factors and the role of the group.
Recommendation 11: The Department for Transport should take immediate
action to put a stop to ‘out of area taxis’ and bring in more rigorous statutory
standards for local authority licensing and regulation of taxi drivers.
Recommendation 12: The government should commit to fully resourcing the
implementation of these recommendations over multiple years and to tracking
their implementation across departments and other organisations, with regular
reports to Parliament.
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