UK launches £100m crackdown on grooming gangs as ministers vow to track down rapists and reopen hundreds of abandoned cases
Shabana Mahmood pledged to “track down the vile rapists” behind the grooming gang scandal as she announced £100m in funding for police investigations.
The Home Secretary said there would be no hiding place for the “predatory monsters”, pledging that they would be put behind bars by the specialist teams of investigators, including undercover detectives.
The police investigations run alongside the public inquiry into grooming gangs announced by Sir Keir Starmer last summer after initially resisting a full national statutory investigation.
Some £38m of the £100m will go to Operation Beaconport, the National Crime Agency investigation into hundreds of previously closed inquiries into grooming gangs. This represents a tenfold increase in its current budget.
More than 1,200 cases in 23 forces where police and prosecutors decided to take no further action have already been referred to Beaconport detectives.
They will review lines of inquiry that were not pursued and interview victims whose accounts were previously ignored. Of the 1,273 cases, 236 relate to allegations of rape.
Ms Mahmood told The Telegraph: “The grooming gangs scandal is one of the darkest moments in our country’s history, where the most vulnerable people were abused and exploited at the hands of evil child rapists.
“There will be no hiding place for the predatory monsters who committed unimaginable crimes of child sexual abuse and exploitation. We will track down these vile rapists and put them behind bars.”
The inquiry is chaired by Baroness Longfield, who will outline her plans to MPs on the home affairs committee on Tuesday.
Baroness Longfield has said her inquiry will pass any evidence it uncovers to police and will not “shy away” from investigating the specific ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds of the perpetrators, many of whom were Asian.
She has also made it clear that any officers or council officials suspected of deliberately covering up the abuse will be held accountable, and their files will be passed to the police investigators.
Nearly £25m will be targeted at tackling the “highest harm offenders” like Jamie Beckett, 37, who was sentenced to 23 years after he sexually abused seven vulnerable children by offering cash for medical appointments, electricity, and Wi-Fi in exchange for indecent images.
National Crime Agency investigators were able to bring him to justice through an investigation that traced complex digital and financial trails.
The £25m includes £11.7m to fund a national network of covert officers who target predators on the dark web and aim to stop abuse before it happens. Their work has led to 1,748 children being protected from further sexual abuse and 1,797 arrests between April 2024-25.
It also includes more than £9m being spent on cutting-edge AI technology to speed up police investigations, including translation tools to accelerate digital investigations involving different languages. It will reduce work that took hours to seconds.
It will enable police to quickly analyze large amounts of digital data to identify communication patterns and relationships between suspects, as well as classify the content of text messages to stop other instances of child sexual exploitation.
The remaining £40m-plus will fund investigations by officers from police forces across England and Wales into child sexual abuse.
Jav Oomer, the director of child sexual abuse investigations at the NCA, said: “We continue to see the increasing complexity and severity of CSA offending, with offenders becoming more technologically sophisticated, but also producing more severe and more sadistic material.”
Becky Riggs, the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead for child protection, said: “This funding helps ensure that all victims and survivors are seen, heard, and supported, whether their experiences are recent or non-recent, online or offline.”
Head of Investigations
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