LONDON (Reuters) -Britain will back new local inquiries into child sexual abuse across the country, the government said on Thursday, after weeks of criticism by U.S. billionaire Elon Musk stirred renewed concern about a decades-old scandal over grooming gangs.
The scandal involved organised groups in English towns and cities raping and sexually exploiting vulnerable young girls, since at least the 1980s to the 2010s. The cases prompted a number of local investigations and a broader nationwide public inquiry into child sexual abuse.
Musk, a close ally of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, has accused British authorities of not doing enough. His criticisms have focused on Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, although Labour was not in power for some of the period in question, and have been the latest in his attacks on Starmer since the prime minister took office last July.
Interior minister Yvette Cooper said the government would set out a timetable before Easter to implement the 20 recommendations of a national inquiry published in 2022 but would also go further and back new local investigations.
“Despite all those national inquiries, reports and hundreds of recommendations, far too little action has been taken, and shamefully little progress has been made,” Cooper told parliament.
She stopped short of announcing a new national public inquiry into the scandal, which Musk and the opposition Conservative Party have called for.
“This is a step in the right direction, but the results will speak for themselves,” Musk wrote on X, reposting a government announcement on the new measures.
The Conservatives were in power from 2010-2024. In targeting Starmer, Musk has said he failed to tackle the crisis when he was chief prosecutor from 2008-2013 and has called him “complicit in the rape of Britain”.
Starmer has strongly defended his record, saying he had overcome resistance to tackling the scandal by reopening cases.
In a number of past cases the perpetrators of the sexual grooming and abuse were predominantly of Pakistani heritage. A 2014 report criticised police and local authorities for failing to take action due to concerns over appearing racist.
Britain’s police chief for child protection, Becky Riggs, has said that while recent media attention has focused on perpetrators of Pakistani heritage, group-based child abuse occurs across ethnicities.
In addition to backing local reviews, Cooper said she had asked Louise Casey, a former senior official who has led previous high-profile reviews, to undertake a “rapid audit” of the current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation in Britain.
Critics have accused Musk of meddling in European politics. In recent months he has called for Starmer to be replaced, labelled German Chancellor Olaf Scholz an “incompetent fool” and urged a vote for the far-right Alternative for Germany in February’s election there.
(Reporting by Catarina Demony and Sachin RavikumarEditing by William James and Frances Kerry)
