Nigel Farage calls for parliament-led inquiry into UK grooming gangs
Reform leader lambasts Labour government for delays to investigation
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has called for a parliamentary-led inquiry into grooming gangs, one week after the national inquiry into child sex abuse across England and Wales descended into bitter infighting.
Farage, speaking beside sexual abuse victim Ellie-Ann Reynolds at a press conference in Whitehall, criticised the Labour government for delays to the investigation and for a lack of impartiality in its handling of the probe.
The Reform leader said a parliamentary-led committee could complete the inquiry “incredibly quickly” and in the “full glare of the media”.
The probe, announced by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in June, was thrown into turmoil last week when four survivors and two frontrunners to chair it dropped out. Disagreements within the victims’ panel led to calls from opposition MPs to sack safeguarding minister Jess Phillips.
The probe is looking into whether state agencies failed to do more to protect largely white girls from the grooming gangs — disproportionately comprising men of Asian or Pakistani heritage — for fear of being accused of racism.
Farage added that parliamentary committees had “extraordinary powers”, including the “power to summon anybody”, referring to when the Treasury select committee summoned former executives, including Sir Fred Goodwin of Royal Bank of Scotland, after the banking collapse in 2009.
“This inquiry is dead in the water. It started five months ago. But what has happened? Nothing. They can’t even agree who the chair is going to be,” he said.
Unlike a national public inquiry, which is a formal legal process run by an independent chair with powers to demand evidence, a parliamentary inquiry is led by MPs and aims to hold people to account through public questioning rather than legal proceedings.
The leader of the rightwing populist party said such an investigation “could be done by Christmas”.
The current panel, consisting of roughly 30 survivors of sexual abuse, is divided on the type of sexual exploitation and abuse that should be included within the inquiry’s scope. Some claim the probe has been “watered down”.
Four victims, including Reynolds, has complained the scope of the inquiry has widened to also include other types of sexual abuse.
Speaking on Monday, Reynolds — one of the victims to publicly resign from the investigations’ survivor liaison panel last week — said there were many people who agree with us “that still haven’t come out and said it”.
She described the public inquiry as “a mess from the start”, adding that in her view, the panel did not “want to vocalise the ethnicity” of the men who committed the crimes against them.
“It was rigged from the start,” she added.
In the same press conference, Farage defended the Reform MP Sarah Pochin after she suggested there were too many black and Asian people in adverts.
On Monday Starmer branded the comments as racist, telling broadcasters: “Nigel Farage has got some questions to answer, because either he doesn’t consider it racist, which in my view is shocking in itself, or he does think it’s racist and he’s shown absolutely no leadership.”
Farage, however, defended Pochin, the MP for Runcorn and Helsby. He said the words she used were “ugly” and could be read as “very, very unpleasant”, but that he understood the context in which she had made the comments.
Pochin apologised on Saturday, saying her comments were “poorly phrased”. However, she maintained that “British TV adverts have gone DEI-mad and are now under-representative of British society as a whole”.