Senior police officers failed to protect girls from grooming gangs in Rotherham because they prioritised other crimes to hit Home Office targets, a leaked report has revealed.
South Yorkshire Police (SYP) focused on vehicle, burglary and robbery crimes as these were Home Office targets during the 2000s, according to an investigation by the police watchdog.
The findings are contained in a damning report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) that was completed in June 2022, but never published.
They are likely to raise fresh calls for a national inquiry into grooming that would shine a light on the historic failings.
The report, seen by The Telegraph, explains that: “Throughout the 2000s, Home Office performance targets were very prescriptive and constabularies were mandated to deal with vehicle, burglary and robbery crimes as priority which they were subsequently assessed upon.”
Report followed complaint
It said that officers “cited the national key performance indicator targets as being one reason that CSE was never a high priority, as it was not something that they were assessed upon in terms of performance”.
The IOPC report followed a complaint by Jayne Senior, a youth services manager who was instrumental in publicising the plight of young white girls who were the victims of sexual grooming by men of mainly Pakistani heritage in Rotherham.
Her complaint – that senior officers failed in their statutory duty to protect children over a two-decade period from grooming gangs – was upheld by the police watchdog.
However, when South Yorkshire Police was presented with the findings of the report, it rejected them and no further action was taken.
Call for national inquiry
Last week, the Government announced plans for nationally backed local inquiries into grooming gangs, with the first due to be in Oldham, reversing an earlier Home Office decision not to back such an inquiry.
But Ms Senior said that the Government’s plans “do not go far enough”. Instead, she called for a full-scale national inquiry, as she believes senior officers and other professionals who failed grooming victims have never been properly held to account.
She told The Telegraph: “A national inquiry needs to go further – it needs to look at which professionals knew about this, who was complicit, who covered it up.
“Many of these senior officers have now retired or are now doing other jobs – they have never been held to account.”
The IOPC report, titled Operation Amazon, says that former SYP officers claimed that the issue of child sexual exploitation was “never brought to their attention” and they “reject any assertion that national policing performance targets” were a barrier to tackling the issue.
But the report found that some of the “high-profile figures” who went on to receive lengthy prison sentences for grooming girls, were known to South Yorkshire Police.
The report says that from “as early as 2001, named perpetrators of CSE and their victims” were discussed at meetings.
Officers failed to act on the information, the report says, adding that some “named perpetrators” were discussed in 2001-2 but “seemingly dismissed”. Those same individuals “went on to continue to abuse young girls” until they were convicted some 15 years later in 2016, it added.
‘They wanted to silence me’
Ms Senior said that when she was shown the findings of Operation Amazon in 2022, she felt under pressure from the IOPC not to talk publicly about its findings, including being told that senior police officers may sue her if she did.
“I think they wanted to silence me, which is what they have been trying to do from day one. They didn’t want any more reputational damage to South Yorkshire Police,” she added.
A source at the police watchdog said that their conversations with Ms Senior about publishing the report were aimed at conveying the legal difficulties she may face and the impact this may have on her.
Ms Senior said that when she submitted a complaint to South Yorkshire Police, she was initially turned down and was told that if she continued to make complaints she would be marked as a “vexatious complainant”.
‘Industrial scale abuse’
Georgina Halford-Hall, chief executive of Whistleblowers UK, said: “This landmark IOPC report only goes part of the way to providing answers. It fails to hold anyone to account for failures that undoubtedly allowed the industrial scale abuse of children.”
She said that a national inquiry should be carried out by a new, independent body, the Office of the Whistleblower, which would protect whistleblowers like Ms Senior from being “scapegoated for doing the right thing”.
Georgina Halford-Hall says the report ‘fails to hold anyone to account for failures’
On Saturday night, Oliver Coppard, the mayor of South Yorkshire, urged the police watchdog to publish the findings of Operation Amazon.
“My job is to make sure that people in South Yorkshire have confidence in the work of the police force of South Yorkshire and until and unless we know exactly what has gone on, that is incredibly difficult for me to reassure them on,” he told Channel 4 News.
Asked why Operation Amazon was never published, an IOPC spokesman pointed to Operation Linden, a separate inquiry carried out into grooming in Rotherham, which was published in 2022.
“The welfare of survivors was our top priority throughout Operation Linden,” they said. “Any release of information into the public domain was painstakingly co-ordinated so as to not unduly or adversely impact their well-being and safeguarding.
“Similarly to the other investigation reports, the report from our dedicated investigation which focused on senior officers within the force could not be published due to the very personal information and data included within it,” the spokesman added.
“That is why we produced one overarching report for Operation Linden, which involved 91 separate investigations, detailing our findings and recommendations.
“In publishing our findings in 2022 we made clear that South Yorkshire Police failed to protect vulnerable children and young people at that time and should have done better in responding to reports of child sexual abuse. The force acknowledged those failings and the focus remains on learning from those mistakes.”
A spokesman for South Yorkshire Police said: “The Terms of Reference for any IOPC investigation is set by them.The decision on whether to publish the report is entirely a matter for the IOPC.”
