Grooming gang issue not about politics, Badenoch says

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Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch introduces a press conference with grooming gang survivors, insisting it is "not about politics".   Report by Faragt. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

Transcript

00:00In the last 48 hours, we have heard a lot about the rape gang scandal and about a national inquiry.

00:08And what I want to do this morning is bring some light where there's been a lot of heat.

00:13What we haven't heard very much of is the survivors' views. Survivors and their families

00:19have gone through hell to get here, and I think that they've been ignored for far too long.

00:24So what this morning is about is not the politics, but giving them a platform to say what they

00:32want to see from a national inquiry. And I'll start by saying how much we welcome Baroness

00:40Casey's reports and the recommendation for a national inquiry. This is something that we've

00:45been very vocal on in the House of Commons, and we're really glad that we finally got to this

00:50place. And I think it's important to reiterate why we want a national inquiry. It's not just

00:56because we believe this is still ongoing. It is because so much activity has taken place.

01:032014, 2015, 2018, local inquiries, investigations launched by the Home Office, independent reports,

01:11independent inquiries, a gang's task force as recently as 2023 finding about 807 perpetrators

01:18and 4,000 victims just last year. This is what made me decide that a national inquiry was

01:25critical, that no-one has joined the dots, that the scale of this is much bigger than any of us

01:32envisaged, even as we were looking at this. And we need a national inquiry and criminal investigations

01:38not just to look at the perpetrators, but where there was institutional failure. This is work that

01:43has not been done.

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