Suella Braverman’s plan to make it a legal requirement for professionals to report any suspicions of child sexual abuse was first proposed a decade ago by Keir Starmer, HuffPost UK has learned.
The home secretary unveiled the policy as part of the government’s attempts top “stamp out” grooming gangs.
Braverman said she was committed to introducing so-called “mandatory reporting” across the whole of England.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday, she said: “Our safeguarding professionals, such as teachers and social workers, are valued public servants who play a vital role in protecting and nurturing future generations.
“I know the overwhelming majority of them, along with the public, consider it a duty on themselves and their colleagues to report any indication of the sexual abuse of a child.”
She said the law needed to be strengthened to “ensure those who fail to do so face the full force of the law”.
But it has emerged that Starmer proposed the change in 2013, just after he stood down as Director of Public Prosecutions and two years before he became a Labour MP.
He told the BBC’s Panorama programme: “I think the time has come to change the law and close a gap that’s been there for a very long time. I think there should be a mandatory reporting provision.
“The problem is, if you haven’t got a central provision requiring people to report, then all you can do is fall back on other provisions that aren’t really designed for that purpose and that usually means they run into difficulties. What you really need is a clear, direct law that everybody understands.”
Braverman today joined Rishi Sunak to launch the “grooming gang taskforce”, which will help police forces carry out investigations into the problem of child sexual exploitation by groups of men.
But a row has broken out over their claims that “political correctness” was to blame for the failure to tackle the problem until now.
That reference to high-profile grooming cases in the north of England involving gangs of men from an Asian background.
Braverman told Sky News: “What we’ve seen is a practice whereby vulnerable white English girls, sometimes in care, sometimes who are in challenging circumstances, being pursued and raped and drugged and harmed by gangs of British Pakistani men who’ve worked in child abuse rings or networks.
“It’s now down to the authorities to track these perpetrators down without fear or favour relentlessly and bring them to justice.”
However, a Home Office study, published in December 2020, said: “Research has found that group-based child exploitation offenders are most commonly white.”
Keir Starmer said: “The vast majority of sexual abuse cases do not involve those of ethnic minorities and so I am all for clamping down on any kind of case, but if we are going to be serious we have to be honest about what the overlook is.”