Andrew Norfolk: Former Yorkshire Post journalist who exposed Rotherham grooming gangs dies aged 60

It led to an inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, which covered the period 1997 to 2013 and made a “conservative estimate” that around 1,400 children were sexually exploited over 16 years.

Sir Keir Starmer, who was director of public prosecutions when the scandal was revealed, said Norfolk was “absolutely integral” in helping to change the law so more grooming gang members could be convicted.

“He wasn’t just an incredibly talented reporter, at The Times and elsewhere, he was driven by the desire to call our attention to injustice and protect the most vulnerable,” the Prime Minister said.

“His passion for supporting the victims of grooming gangs shone through, and he was absolutely integral to making sure we could change the rules to increase convictions of the vile perpetrators.”

The issue had been raised first by Ann Cryer, the former Labour MP for Keighley, who had been told of girls being groomed by older men outside two local schools. Norfolk, at that time a Northern-based reporter for The Times, spent months studying court reports of cases that might map out a pattern.

He discovered that groups of men were being prosecuted for sexual grooming in several parts of the North and that the cases shared similar characteristics: girls between 11 and 15 being plied with alcohol and drugs and then taken in cars to gatherings where men waited in line to have sex with them.

Reports had been made – but largely ignored – by police and social services and it took four years of obsessive research on Norfolk’s part to bring the scandal to national attention.

It emerged eventually that first-hand accounts by some of the girls involved had been dismissed by officials who deemed them not to be credible witnesses and did not want to stir racial tensions.

Norfolk began to piece together the facts when in the summer of 2010 he heard a radio report of nine men convicted in Manchester for multiple sex offences against a 14-year-old who had been “befriended” and “passed around”. In the following months he identified 17 more cases involving 56 men, most of them Pakistani Muslims.

It led him to report in January 2011 that a “conspiracy of silence” had allowed the practice to flourish across the North and Midlands and that authorities had sought to play down the issue.

For his pains Norfolk was accused of racism – mostly, he said, by “left-wing academics” – and received two death threats.

But he pursued the story, meeting and talking to victims and eventually learning of a case in Rotherham where police, having been called to a flat in the small hours of the morning and discovered an almost naked 13-year-old girl with seven men, arrested only the girl.

She was convicted of being drunk and disorderly while the men were released without being questioned.

Norfolk met opposition to his reporting from South Yorkshire Police and Rotherham Council, which issued a high court injunction to try to stop his story but in the event did not turn up at court.

Eventually in 2013 the council commissioned an internal inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay which was published the following year and found that 1,400 girls had been groomed and abused in the town over about 15 years.

Some were threatened with being set alight if they talked to anyone.

Andrew Mark Norfolk was born in Canterbury in 1965. His parents were David Norfolk, a headmaster and Methodist lay preacher, and Olive, née Bellerby. In 1976 the family moved to Yorkshire when David was made headmaster of the independent Ashville School in Harrogate.

Andrew went on to Durham University, where he studied English, before beginning his journalism career at what was then the Evening News in Scarborough.

In 1995 he moved on to The Yorkshire Post where he got his first experience of investigative journalism with a series of award-winning reports on a very different local scandal – serial corruption at Doncaster Council.

It became known as Donnygate and ended with hefty jail terms for a senior Labour councillor and the property developer who bribed him.

Norfolk moved to The Times in 2000 when his brother Tim applied on his behalf, attaching his Yorkshire Post cuttings file on Donnygate, which at the time was considered the worst local government corruption case since the Poulson scandal of the 1970s. Andrew served a period on the paper in London – a city he disliked – before getting his wish to move back North.

Eventually he became its chief investigative reporter, in which capacity he helped expose the scandal of money being deducted from the industrial disease compensation paid to sick coal miners.

That led to changes in how the Law Society handled such issues and the return of millions of pounds to miners, especially in Yorkshire and the North Midlands. Eleven solicitors were struck off and many more disciplined, and two union leaders were jailed.

John Mann, now Lord Mann, the former Labour MP for Bassetlaw, was Norfolk’s friend and a principal contact on the story and said his death had robbed the North of “its most brilliant investigative journalist”, adding that “his humility, decency and integrity was uncompromising always seeking out the real story and the truth”.

Norfolk retired last autumn as his health began to fail but was interviewed at length earlier this year in the wake of what he saw as Elon Musk’s attempt to weaponise the facts of the grooming scandal. Norfolk said the cultural issues that allowed the practice to thrive within communities had yet to be addressed or fully understood.

For his work on the story he won the Paul Foot Award and was named Journalist of the Year at the 2014 British Journalism Awards.