Birmingham Local Conservatives have welcomed the announcement that Birmingham will be included in the national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs, following sustained calls for the city’s historic and current cases to be fully investigated.
Councillor Robert Alden, Leader of the Conservative Group on Birmingham City Council, said:
“Birmingham’s inclusion in the national grooming gangs inquiry is extremely welcome, we are pleased the inquiry have listened to our arguments to include Birmingham. Above all, this must be about getting truth and justice for the children who were failed and ensuring that those failures can never be repeated”.
“For too long there have been unanswered questions about what happened in Birmingham, what authorities knew, how victims were treated and whether opportunities to protect vulnerable children were missed”.
“That is why the Birmingham Local Conservatives brought a motion to the City Council calling for a full national inquiry and specifically calling for historic and current grooming gang abuse in Birmingham and the wider West Midlands to be investigated”.
“Crucially, our motion also called for relevant evidence to be identified and protected so that it would be available to any future inquiry. The announcement today demonstrates exactly why preserving that evidence was so important”.
Local Conservatives then lead a joint letter calling specifically for Birmingham to be included in the national inquiry. Reform, the Greens and Liberal Democrats were invited to sign that letter but chose not to do so.
“Now that Birmingham is to be included, party politics must take second place to getting to the truth, so that the people committing these horrific crimes are stopped and face the full force of the law. If anyone is found to have helped cover these horrendous crimes they must also be brought to justice”.
Councillor Matt Bennett (Con, Edgbaston) Conservative Shadow Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Families and Chair of the Education, Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny Committee said:
“Birmingham City Council, Birmingham Children’s Trust and every other public body involved must cooperate fully and openly with the inquiry. Every relevant document must be preserved and provided, every request for evidence must be met and there must be no attempt to protect institutions or reputations from uncomfortable findings”.
“Recent events have underlined why that transparency matters. The emergence of the 1991 Jill Jesson research, more than three decades after it was produced, raises serious questions about what was known historically, what happened to evidence and whether warnings were properly acted upon”.
“The inquiry must be able to follow the evidence wherever it leads, including difficult questions about institutional failures and the ethnicity, religion and cultural background of perpetrators where those factors are relevant. We encourage anyone with any information to submit evidence to the inquiry”.
The inquiry page for Birmingham, including how people can submit evidence is here: Birmingham – The Statutory Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs
“This is about children who were raped and sexually exploited when the authorities should have been protecting them. Their experiences must be at the heart of what happens next”.
“We welcome Birmingham’s inclusion in the inquiry. We will now hold the council to the commitment our motion sought: preserve the evidence, produce the evidence, cooperate fully and let the truth come out.”
Background notes
- Local Conservative motion calling for Inquiry into grooming gangs June 2025
- Local Conservatives commitment to deliver a inquiry into grooming gangs in Birmingham if we won control of the Council in May 2026
- Local Conservatives letter June 2026
Local Conservatives Cross Party letter July 2026
