In an ongoing debate about whether or not a new national inquiry into grooming gangs should be carried out, there have been various claims about what the last government did, or was about to do, regarding recommendations from Alexis Jay’s 2022 inquiry.
One particular recommendation currently up for debate is that of the introduction of mandatory reporting.
FactCheck takes a look.
What has the Conservative Party said about the Alexis Jay national inquiry recommendations?
Professor Alexis Jay led the landmark inquiry into child sexual abuse, and her 2022 report made 20 recommendations, including mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse and placing certain individuals under a statutory duty to report this abuse.
Keir Starmer and Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badeoch, clashed during Prime Minister’s Questions on 8 January about whether the previous government implemented any of these recommendations.
Sir Keir said: “The national inquiry Professor Jay carried out took seven years. It had 20 recommendations, none of which were actually implemented by the Conservative party when it was in government.”
Ms Badenoch replied: “I am shocked that the Prime Minister would say that actions were not taken. He knows full well that we accepted 18 of the 20 recommendations from the Jay inquiry, and went further, launching a gangs taskforce which found 550 more perpetrators.”
The prime minister responded: “The right hon. Lady says that the last government accepted the recommendations, but they did not act on them.”
But shadow home secretary Robert Jenrick told Channel 4 News’ Paul McNamara a day earlier: “We began to implement the Jay report.”
He then mentioned the mandatory reporting recommendation in particular, which Sir Keir said during PMQs, was “one of the central recommendations” that “still has not been enacted”.
Mr Jenrick said that “the two most important recommendations” were “to change the law so that there was mandatory reporting so public officials had to say if they came across or suspected that there was child sexual exploitation”, and “that there were tougher sentences, so that we made an aggravated offence if you were part of a grooming gang”.
He added: “We drafted that law, it was in the criminal justice bill that was before parliament, sadly it fell away at the general election but the Labour government has said they will take that forward and of course we will support that.”
Was the previous government going to implement the mandatory reporting recommendation?
The previous government’s proposed amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill – published 12 days before the general election was called – did include making it mandatory for certain people to report child sexual abuse.
But Prof Jay’s recommendation went further than this. She said it should be a criminal offence for these ‘mandated reporters’ to fail to report child sexual abuse if a victim or perpetrator told them about the abuse, or if they witnessed abuse themselves.
The Conservative government’s draft legislation only proposed a new criminal offence where someone prevents someone else from reporting abuse.
It did not propose making it a criminal offence for failing to report the abuse yourself – as the Jay report recommends.
FactCheck verdict
Shadow home secretary Jenrick said the previous government, led by the Conservatives, was about to bring in Prof Alexis Jay’s recommendation regarding mandatory reporting in relation to child sexual abuse.
The Conservative government had included part of this recommendation in its proposed amendments to the Criminal Justice Bill before the last election.
However, part of Prof Jay’s recommendation was to make it a criminal offence to fail to report abuse. This was not part of the previous government’s draft law.
The Conservative party and Mr Jenrick’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
(Image credit: Tolga Akmen/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
