National inquiry to probe grooming gangs in Oldham, Bradford and London
Oldham leads the new inquiry because the city had already demanded one, while Bradford, Keighley and London pull long-ignored failures back into view.
Oldham, Bradford, Keighley and London were named as the first places the national Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs will examine.
Baroness Anne Longfield CBE is chairing the three-year statutory inquiry with Zoë Billingham CBE and Eleanor Kelly CBE. The final terms of reference were published on 31 March 2026 after consultation, and the inquiry began work on 13 April 2026 with full legal powers under the Inquiries Act to compel witnesses, require documents and records, and pass material to police where it may support prosecutions. Its remit explicitly covers how ethnicity, religion and cultural factors affected both perpetrators and the response from authorities.
Oldham Council asked the Home Secretary for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in July 2024, but Jess Phillips rejected the request in October 2024 and said the council itself should decide whether to commission a local inquiry. Yvette Cooper later told MPs in January 2025 that none of the recommendations from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse had been implemented. The earlier child sexual abuse inquiry took seven years and produced 20 recommendations in its final 2022 report.
Fiona Goddard resigned from the inquiry’s survivor liaison panel in October 2025, describing the process as “toxic” and warning that services risked being allowed to “mark their own homework.” She said the language around survivors had been “secretive” and “condescending and controlling.” Goddard was abused in Bradford as a teenager by a gang of men mainly of Pakistani origin, and nine men were convicted in 2019 of offences including rape and inciting child prostitution after a trial lasting more than six weeks.
The London Assembly Police and Crime Committee opened its own investigation into grooming gangs in London on 26 May 2026, and the Metropolitan Police is reviewing 9,000 historic cases of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse from the last 15 years that ended in no further action. As of November 2025, 1,200 of those cases were in scope.
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