Diana Johnson, Shadow Home Affairs Minister, in response to the report from the Home Affairs Select Committee report on child sexual exploitation, said:
“We must not allow the farce created by Theresa May to distract us from confronting the horrifying scale of abuse that was allowed to happen in Rotherham. This report, once again, shows that Rotherham Council and South Yorkshire Police “ignored numerous, credible warnings about the scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham”. It is clear that numerous senior figures allowed this to happen with shocking indifference to the abuse of girls. That is why Labour is backing a change in the law to introduce clear sanctions for those who don’t follow allegations up.
“This report highlights the complete mess that Theresa May has made of policing by putting in place Police and Crime Commissioners (PCC) that cannot be removed even when they have lost the confidence of the entire community they serve. The Home Affairs Select Committee recommends more legislation to enable PCCs to be removed, but Labour would go further and save millions of pounds by scrapping PCCs altogether.
“While we should hold all of these individuals to account we also need to realise that the only way to prevent this happening again is to institute serious institutional change across local authorities, the Police and the CPS. It is vital that this is included in the terms of reference for the much-delayed inquiry into child abuse.
"This report comes just months after we learnt that the Police know of 20,000 individuals they suspect of accessing online child abuse but aren’t planning to follow-up. We have to reform the way police deals with sexual abuse so that it is never ignored, never trivialised and never considered too complex to be worth investigating.”
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