My idea for a new grooming gang inquiry

Spectator

21 hours ago

It's disorienting but satisfying that Labour now accepts that Asian grooming gangs exist. Some of my left-identified friends are even beginning to share the outrage – over Qari Abdul Rauf, for instance, one of the nastiest of the Rochdale rapists, who still lives in Rochdale a decade after the first steps to deport him were taken. Rauf simply ripped up his Pakistani passport and couldn't then be shifted. He's cost the taxpayer nearly £300,000 in legal fees, but still has enough dosh to throw regular house parties and, it was reported this week, to start building a second home back in Pakistan. Pimping out children pays.
It's nice that the left and right share the impotent anger. But as there's nothing for the moment to be done about the Raufs, why don't we channel that rage into trying to make sure the same thing isn't happening again?
It was girls in care who were mostly targeted by grooming gangs. They were far from home and desperate for affection. Easy prey. And honestly, nothing much has changed. The system that took abused children and served them up to Pakistani predators is still functioning in the same way. More and more damaged children enter the system every year and there's a drastic shortage of places to house them. Councils are desperate, so for want of local homes the kids are dumped in distant, unfamiliar places; in institutions that are often unregulated or simply ignored by Ofsted. Look them up yourself on the Ofsted site: not yet inspected; pending inspection. Happy hunting, paedos.
'Looked-after' children, they're called. The joke's in the name, because these kids are often sent many miles, sometimes hundreds of miles, from any extended family, grandparents, aunts or uncles who might do some looking-after. Here's a little taste of the madness for you.
Children taken into care stay in their existing schools. This seems fair and decent – they need some continuity and stability. But because the homes they're put in are so far away, they have to travel – sometimes for hours – by cab to get to class and back again. Councils, already cash-strapped, are bankrupting themselves paying for cabs for kids.
The money wasted is staggering. In my neck of the woods, the north-east, Newcastle council's taxi bill last year for children in care was around £1.2 million. That was a 35 per cent jump from 2023, so Lord only knows what this year's bill will be.
All over the country, children are rising at dawn to ensure they arrive at school on time. No clubs, no playdates afterwards, because it's back in the car again. And – no disrespect to cab drivers in general – who is driving those taxis? Who's incentivised to drive them? Four men in the Rochdale gang were taxi drivers; some members of the Oxford grooming gang too. The Oxford Pakistani gang, who targeted very young girls in care, specialised in what the girls called 'torture sex' and made £600 an hour selling torture rape services to other Pakistani men in the Cowley region. They relied on the taxis to ferry the often comatose children about.
When people bring up the predicament of kids in care, they often insist the problem is under-funding. But the bleak absurdity of the care homes scandal is that they're a product of too much money as well as too little. A private provider can demand an astonishing amount to look after each child – sometimes as much as £25,000 a month, depending on the child's 'needs'. This is guaranteed money, so of course private providers have risen like carp. The majority of care homes for children are now privately run and it's money for old rope: much less public oversight and the children can hardly complain or choose a different provider. A private care home answers primarily to shareholders, which is why the homes are clustered in parts of the country with cheap property and cheap staff. What does it matter to a private care-home provider if the children are commuting for pointless hours? It's the council that foots the taxi bill.
An interesting case in point is the private company that dominates the sector, CareTech, founded by two brothers, Haroon and Farouq Sheikh, of Pakistani origin. CareTech Holdings is one of the biggest providers of children's homes in the UK, often under the auspices of its wholly owned subsidiary Cambian Group, and the Sheikhs do very well for themselves. In 2021, the Times reported Farouq Sheikh's total remuneration package was £833,000. Haroon's was even tastier: £971,000. In the same year, Cambian posted pre-tax profits of £24.45 million.
Also interesting is how unreliably this financial success translates into decent childcare. Ofsted's reports from the same year showed it had judged nine of Cambian's 173 children's homes 'inadequate' in two months, and inadequate in Ofsted-speak really doesn't mean inadequate; it means catastrophic. While there were no actual allegations of abuse at the home, children there, at potentially high risk of sexual exploitation, had allegedly gone missing without staff seeming to think it a problem. Girls had seemingly told staff they had met unknown adult males and had sex in exchange for cash without triggering any alarm.
I accept that this isn't the Sheikh brothers' fault. They can't visit every one of Care-Tech's homes, and safeguarding guidance has been put in place on how to spot and address signs of possible abuse. But Farouq Sheikh has been a significant donor to the Labour party, in particular to Sadiq Khan, whose mayoral campaign he supported. In 2020 he was awarded an OBE for services to specialist care, after which he humbly said: 'As a family we will continue to play our part in helping local and global communities.'
I have an idea about that. Given his experience and his connection with government, Pakistan and the care-home industry, wouldn't it be a grand idea if Farouq Sheikh OBE led the UK's Pakistani community in a grooming gangs inquiry of its own? That really might play a part in helping local communities, and the vulnerable children to whom they owe their fortune.