Authorities should have known about the abuse, professor warns

Professor Alexis Jay’s inquiry detailed gang rapes, grooming, trafficking and other sexual exploitation on a wide scale in the South Yorkshire town between 1997 and 2013

Professor Jay said that, given the information available to agencies by April 2005, “nobody could say ‘I didn’t know’.”

A South Yorkshire MP has said he was astounded that no action had been taken against any officers at the council given the scale of abuse that was highlighted in Prof Jay’s report.

Clive Betts, the Labour MP for Sheffield East also warned that Rotherham Council would need outside support as it responds to the recommendations of the report and supports the victims.

He said: “I am not talking about them losing control of services but there will need to be outside support from both the Government and the Local Government Association.”

Dramatic funding cuts to Rotherham Council have put the authority under extreme pressure at a time when it is faced with high demands to support vulnerable children and families, according to Prof Jay’s damning report.

It says the authority will have lost 33 per cent of its spending power compared to 2011. The national average is 20 per cent and authorities such as Buckinghamshire have only seen a 4.5 per cent drop. The report says Rotherham is faced with high demands for children’s services because of significant levels of poverty.

Mr Betts added: “There is political responsibility and officer led responsibility for this. The leader of the council has taken political responsibility for this by resigning as soon as the report was published but we have not seen officer responsibility. And I find it astounding that there have been no disciplinary proceedings against any officers as result of the failings identified.”

Prof Jay said: “Part of my remit was to identify what information was available to key people in positions of influence throughout that time. And there was certainly a very great deal of information available from an early stage; indeed from at least 2001, both through a youth project which did outreach work with these young victims and children’s social care.

“But also because there were at least three key reports which were made available to the agencies concerned whose conclusions couldn’t have been clearer. Then finally members of the council had seminars organised at which the detail of the youth project and indeed some of the other material ... was included in that. Names of potential perpetrators, car registration numbers, a very great deal of detail.

She said the exploitation covered by the report was “at the worst end of seriousness”. She added: “I have spent decades looking at complex cases of child protection and I have never encountered such brutality and such abuse.”

She cited a number of possible reasons why authorities did not get to grips with the issue. She said some officers thought that youth services and social workers were “exaggerating the scale of the problem”.

She went on: “There were also concerns that the priority in child protection at the time was younger children and that these mainly girls were making lifestyle choices by choosing to behave in this way. The police might say that they couldn’t act on anything if they didn’t receive complaints but so many of these girls were absolutely terrified for their lives and their families’ lives if they came forward and needed a great deal of support to do this.”