Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp and shadow safeguarding minister Alicia Kearns have called for South Yorkshire Police to be barred from investigating allegations that its own officers sexually abused children during the Rotherham grooming scandal, saying the force’s involvement prevents the inquiry from being conducted “impartially and independently.”
The Conservative MPs wrote to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper after the BBC reported on Tuesday that five women who were exploited by grooming gangs as children have said they were also raped and abused by serving police officers in the town during the 1990s and early 2000s. A further 25 abuse survivors have alleged that corrupt officers either worked with grooming gangs or failed to act on child sexual exploitation allegations.
Among the most harrowing accounts is testimony from one woman who said she was raped from the age of 12 by a serving South Yorkshire Police officer in a marked police car. She claimed the officer would threaten to hand her back to the gang who had been grooming her if she did not comply with his demands.
Professor Alexis Jay, who led the landmark 2014 inquiry that exposed the Rotherham grooming scandal, expressed shock that South Yorkshire Police was investigating its own former officers. There are legitimate reasons for victims to feel a total lack of trust in the force,” she told the BBC, calling for an outside force or the Inspectorate of Constabulary to lead the investigation.
In their letter to Cooper, Philp and Kearns stated: “It is incredibly concerning that the rape and abuse reportedly carried out by South Yorkshire police officers is being investigated by South Yorkshire Police themselves. Whilst we recognise the IOPC is overseeing the investigation, this simply isn’t good enough.”
The Conservative MPs added that “there can be no conflicts of interests which may impede the investigation or deny justice” and urged Cooper to ensure “these children have already been failed more than once – stand with them now.”
South Yorkshire Police confirmed it has a “dedicated team” of detectives working on the case under the direction of the Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC). Three former officers have been arrested as part of the investigation – one man in his sixties and two men in their fifties. One remains on police bail whilst the other two have had their bail lifted while inquiries continue.
The IOPC defended the arrangement, stating it had been “assured by the force that none of the investigating officers had either worked with any of the former officers under investigation or were themselves investigated as part of Op Linden,” the watchdog’s previous investigation into police failings in Rotherham. “We are satisfied that there is no conflict of interest,” an IOPC spokesperson said.
However, Amy Clowrey, a lawyer from Switalskis who has represented Rotherham abuse survivors for more than a decade, said victims have “no faith that SYP will do a thorough job of investigating alleged abuse by their own officers.” She added that authorities had “resisted” requests for investigations into police criminality for years, “despite us providing them with the accounts of survivors.
The allegations represent a devastating new dimension to the Rotherham scandal, in which at least 1,400 children were sexually exploited by gangs of men, predominantly of Pakistani heritage, between 1997 and 2013. Jay’s 2014 report found that South Yorkshire Police had treated victims with “contempt” and shown a lack of respect, deeming them “undesirables” unworthy of protection.
Former Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue, Zoë Billingham CBE, told BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour that it appeared South Yorkshire Police was “marking their own homework in the most catastrophic way.” She said: “Trust and confidence are at the heart of this and victims are not trusting this will be done well, and we have to listen to the victim’s voices in this.
The IOPC’s Operation Linden, completed in 2022 after £6million and seven years of investigation, found that South Yorkshire Police “fundamentally failed in its duty to protect vulnerable children and young people” between 1997 and 2013. Despite investigating 265 separate allegations made by 51 complainants and examining the conduct of 47 officers, not a single officer lost their job during the course of the investigation.
Assistant Chief Constable Hayley Barnett responded to the latest allegations, saying: “We know how hard it must be for a victim or survivor, who has been so badly let down in the past, to put their faith into the South Yorkshire Police of today.” She added that victims and survivors were “at the heart” of the investigation, with all actions being taken in their best interests.
The allegations of police involvement in child sexual abuse come as Operation Stovewood, the National Crime Agency’s investigation into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, continues its work. Led by the NCA since 2014, it has become the single largest law enforcement investigation into non-familial child sexual exploitation and abuse in the UK, identifying around 1,150 potential victims and securing 39 convictions with offenders jailed for a total of around 470 years.
The Conservative intervention adds significant political pressure on the government to act. Neither the Home Office nor South Yorkshire Police had responded to requests for comment at the time of publication, though both have been contacted regarding the Conservative MPs’ demands for an independent investigation.
As survivors await justice more than a decade after the initial scandal broke, the question of whether South Yorkshire Police can credibly investigate its own officers remains at the centre of a controversy that continues to expose institutional failures at the highest levels of British policing.
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- Official portrait of Chris Philp MP (2024 crop) – English description: Official portrait of Chris Philp MP crop 2, 2024, by UK Parliament, taken 22 July 2024, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)
