South Yorkshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner Alan Billings said it is “wrong and grossly unfair” to claim that political correctness is preventing officers from investigating child sexual abuse.

It comes after Home Secretary Suella Braverman singled out British Pakistani men when she raised concerns about grooming gangs last week and said the authorities had failed to act during abuse scandals in Rotherham and Rochdale because they were scared of being called racist.

She also visited Rotherham and met abuse survivors, after announcing a new police taskforce of specialist officers, who will investigate child sexual exploitation, and plans to introduce tougher sentences for offenders.

Dr Billings said there was “some very careless talk” about grooming gangs “that helped nobody” and South Yorkshire Police has confronted its failings and taken action since the abuse scandal was investigated during an independent inquiry in 2014.

“We ensured there was no denial about past mistakes and the teams involved in protecting children understood grooming, helped our communities to spot the signs of it and protected the vulnerable,” he said.

“Officers here who have devoted themselves to safeguarding our children are utterly dedicated to that work and have been praised for the quality of what they do.”

He added: “To suggest that, whatever happened in the past, they would allow ‘cultural sensitivities’ or ‘political correctness’ to get in the way of their investigations, is wrong and grossly unfair."

The Labour PCC also said that if officers focus on Pakistani men when they investigate exploitation, they will “narrow the field of vision” and offenders from other ethnic backgrounds could be missed.

Dr Alan Billings, South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner.

It comes after 21 white people involved in the West Midlands’s largest child sex abuse ring were convicted last week and sentenced to a total of 145 years behind bars.

Dr Billings added: “The point about ethnicity that the politicians should have made is not that the grooming gangs are invariably Asian men – that stereotype would have seriously misled the West Midlands police – but they can be of any ethnicity and any gender.

“That lesson is well understood here.”

The independent inquiry, conducted by Professor Alexis Jay, found there had been at least 1,400 victims of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, and “the majority of known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage”.

In her report, she said local politicians and council staff were reluctant to confront the issue “for fear of being thought racist”.

But it also stated “there is no simple link between race and child sexual exploitation” and across the UK “the greatest numbers of perpetrators are white men”.

An Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) investigation found South Yorkshire Police officers failed to protect the victims and investigate their allegations, believing that many of them were “consenting to their exploitation”.

The watchdog said officers had left victims in cars and at properties with their abusers on numerous occasions. In one case, an abuser was allowed to "hand over" his victim and avoid arrest as part of a deal.

Police chief says ‘very careless talk’ about child abuse in Rotherham ‘helped nobody’