Keir Starmer talks about prosecuting grooming gangs

on child sexual exploitation anything we can do to crack down on it we should do I worked on this for five years when I was director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013 and saw too many of these cases um including I was the director of public prosecutions that gave the green light to prosecute the Rochdale grooming case which was the first of the sort of

multi-defendant group grooming cases involving Pakistani men and so anything we can do to crack down on these cases I'm in favor of us doing but I have to say just two or three things Nick if I may firstly on this question of mandatory reporting the duty to report particularly if you're in a position where you see something going on I called for that in 2013 2013.

that is 10 years ago and this government's been in power now for 13 years that is a decade lost and um I think the Prime Minister and others have to really explain why they've wasted that decade the second thing is that it is right that ethnicity should not be a bar and political correctness should not get in the way of prosecutions and I heard your discussion

earlier on there are examples um which went wrong in the past and we have to deal with that but the vast majority of sexual abuse cases do not involve those of ethnic minorities and so I'm all for clamping down on any kind of case but if we're going to be serious we've got to be honest about what the Overlook is and just one last thing Nick

because it was really instructive for me um when the team my team in the Northwest came down to London to see me in Crown prosecution Service headquarters when they wanted the green light to prosecute the Rochdale grooming case which was the first of these big grooming cases and I looked at the file with them and I heard what they had to say and I said yes

why this man wasn't prosecuted before and then I looked at the fire got them to pull out the file for me I looked at the file and what I found there was something which um concerned me because what I found was good faith police officers good faith prosecutors who made assumptions about in that particular case quite young girls 13 14 15 year old girls if you

recall and the police and prosecutors had in good faith assumed that because these girls hadn't reported what was happening to them straight away to the police because they'd gone back to the perpetrators in these grooming gangs and because they themselves were involved in drinking and other related offenses that they would not be believed by a jury therefore their case couldn't go forward and so at the

heart of that Rochdale phase I found a mass massive floor in our criminal justice system which was these assumptions about you know teenage girls and what they were likely to do and frankly the likelihood of a teenage girl going straight to the police I thought was pretty low so we set about changing the approach um it was really from that case onwards that we changed the

approach so I'm all you know in terms of getting back to your question if anything that can be done to Bear Down on child sexual exploitation I'm up for that but it needs an an honest and robust discussion about what the real problems are underpinning this and they've been there for a very very long time and you know 13 years in power and the gun the

government is sort of stumbling on some of the issues that in my view they should have confronted at least a decade ago