A former children’s commissioner will chair the government’s inquiry into child sexual abuse by grooming gangs.
Baroness Anne Longfield will lead the inquiry, which was derailed in October when four women resigned from its survivors panel and two leading candidates to chair the investigation pulled out.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said “we must root out this evil once and for all” and the inquiry will be a “moment of reckoning”, as she announced the appointment in the Commons.
The prime minister announced the inquiry for England and Wales in June, accepting the recommendation of an audit into the evidence on the nature and scale of group-based child sexual abuse by Baroness Louise Casey.
Baroness Longfield will be joined by panellists Zoe Billingham CBE, a former inspector at HM Constabulary, and Eleanor Kelly CBE, former chief executive of Southwark Council, to lead the inquiry.
Mahmood said Longfield and the two panellists had been recommended by Baroness Casey following “recent engagement with victims” and would meet survivors later this week.
On her appointment, Baroness Longfield said the inquiry “owes it to the victims, survivors and the wider public to identify the truth, address past failings and ensure that children and young people today are protected in a way that others were not”.
The inquiry will comprise a series of targeted local investigations into the group-based child sexual exploitation of girls by grooming gangs, overseen by a national panel.
Mahmood said one of these would be in Oldham, Greater Manchester, with the other locations to be decided.
No area will be able to “resist” a local investigation during the inquiry, she added, which would last three years with a budget of £65m under draft terms of reference.
The inquiry will also “specifically” consider the backgrounds of offenders, including their ethnicity and religion.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said progress on the inquiry was welcome but survivors have been waiting too long for an inquiry they can trust.
“They have been ignored, dismissed and made to feel invisible. They are the ultimate judges of whether this inquiry is credible,” she said.
The inquiry was thrown into chaos earlier this year when four women resigned from its survivors liaison panel in protest at how the government had handled the process so far.
They called for Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips to resign, accusing her of “betrayal” for denying claims the investigation might be broadened beyond grooming gangs.
They also expressed doubts about two candidates proposed to chair the inquiry because one had a background in social work and the other as a senior police officer – two professions facing questions about trust.
At the time, Phillips denied claims of a cover-up and insisted the government was “committed to exposing the failures”.
Five others abuse survivors wrote to the prime minister to say they would only continue working with the inquiry if Phillips kept her job.
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