Home secretary rejects claims that plans for local inquiries are being watered down as Kemi Badenoch suggests some sort of cover up taking place

During her BBC Breakfast interview Kemi Badenoch claimed that the government has dropped the plans for five local inquiries into grooming gang, or child rape scandals, that were announced in January. As she was trying to fend of the questions about Adolescence, she said:

One of the things that I’m more bothered by is the fact that just yesterday, we had Labour telling us that they’re not going to be investigating the rape gang scandal, something which had happened all across the country. That’s real. That’s happening right now. We’re not talking about that.

I am absolutely astonished that Labour has dropped what it said it would do in January. And, as I said to Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions, if he did not have a full national inquiry, people will start to think that there is a cover-up.

They are clearly uncomfortable with having inquiries that are looking into this issue.

As a rule I believe in mess ups rather than conspiracy.

But if true that Labour have shelved even the most limited public enquiries into grooming gangs, it does suggest that powerful Labour politicians have something to hide.

We are developing a new best practice framework to support local authorities that want to undertake victim-centred local inquiries or related work, drawing on the lessons from local independent inquiries such as those in Telford, Rotherham and Greater Manchester. We will publish the details next month.

Alongside that, we will set out the process through which local authorities can access the £5m national fund to support locally-led work on grooming gangs. Following feedback from local authorities, the fund will adopt a flexible approach to support both full independent local inquiries and more bespoke work, including local victims’ panels or locally led audits of the handling of historical cases.

There’s a huge information about this. This is completely wrong. We’re actually increasing, not reducing, the action being taken on this.

Child sexual exploitation, grooming gangs – these are some of the most vile crimes, things like rape or exploitation, coercion. We’re increasing the action against that.

I think that those are all important issues, and those were issues that I’ve been talking about for a long time.

But in the same way that I don’t need to watch Casualty to know what’s going on in the NHS, I don’t need to watch a specific Netflix drama to understand what’s going on. It’s a fictional series. It is not a documentary.

I’m saying very clearly that my job is not to watch lots of TV. My job is to get out there and make sure that I’m talking about the issues that are happening in the country right now.

Badenoch in the right. Stop basing public policy on telly