Former children’s commissioner Anne Longfield will chair the inquiry into grooming gangs after months of delays.
Sir Keir Starmer announced the inquiry in June this year but the national probe was thrown into disarray when four women resigned from its victim liaison panel.
It has taken some months to find a suitable candidate to chair the inquiry amid the ongoing tensions. In October, the final two candidates to chair the inquiry dropped out of the process.
Now the home secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced that Baroness Longfield will take on the role.
The inquiry follows a recommendation made by Louise Casey in her rapid audit looking at the scale of grooming gangs across the country.
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Baroness Longfield will be part of a three-person panel that will also include Zoe Billingham, the chair of Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, and Eleanor Kelly, former chief executive of the London borough of Southwark.
Ms Billingham also has “deep expertise in safeguarding and policing”, Ms Mahmood told MPs. Ms Kelly supported the survivors of the London Bridge terrorist attacks and the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, the home secretary said.
The inquiry will conduct local investigations in areas where suspected serious failings occurred. Ms Mahmood confirmed that one of these locations will be Oldham in the Commons on Tuesday.
The inquiry will also have full legal powers under the Inquiries Act to compel witnesses to give evidence and require organisations to hand over documents and records.
Ministers have committed £65m to the inquiry and said it must not take longer than three years.
Speaking in the Commons on Tuesday, Ms Mahmood said that Baroness Longfield will resign the Labour whip in order to chair the national inquiry.
She said: “She has devoted her life to children’s rights, including running a charity supporting and protecting young people and working for prime ministers of different political parties.”
Ms Mahmood said it was important to call grooming gang “crimes what they were – multiple sexual assaults committed by multiple men on multiple occasions”.
The home secretary continued: “Children were submitted to beatings and gang rapes, many contracted sexually transmitted infections, some were forced to have abortions, others had their children taken from them.”
She said, “Some in positions of power turned a blind eye to the horror, even covered it up,” adding: “What is required now is a moment of reckoning.
“We must cast fresh light on this darkness.”
Responding to a question from Sir Edward Leigh, Ms Mahmood said: “There is nothing Muslim or Islamic about the acts that these evil men have perpetrated. It is not behaviour that any of us would accept or tolerate. All of these things are crimes.”
She said that Muslims in the UK fear that a “collection view” is being taken “of the whole community” because of the reporting of these crimes. “We should always pursue justice without fear or favour,” she added.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp responded to Ms Mahmood’s announcement by calling for an apology from the prime minister, who he said had “disgracefully smeared those calling for an inquiry as ‘far right’.”
He said: “Will the home secretary please apologise on behalf of the prime minister for what he said last January?
“The truth is, this should not have taken several months and the threat of a vote in parliament to agree to this inquiry in the first place, and it should not have taken another six months to appoint a chair.”
Mr Philp, who read out the sentencing remarks of several court cases involving grooming gang victims, added: “The fact is, these crimes were deliberately covered up by those in authority who were more interested in so-called community relations, and in avoiding being called racist, than they were in protecting young girls.”
Former home secretary Yvette Cooper announced a rapid national audit into grooming gangs and local inquiries in January. This three-month audit was led by Dame Casey, who highlighted flaws in data collection.
Dame Casey’s report said data gaps on ethnicity were “appalling” and a “major failing”. It said that the ethnicity of perpetrators was “shied away from” and still not recorded in many cases.
Dame Casey recommended the government conduct a full national inquiry, prompting Sir Keir to commission the review.