British Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer has been accused of overseeing a system which reportedly allowed suspected grooming gang child rapists to walk free with a warning during his time as the country’s top prosecutor.
According to an investigation from the Express newspaper, at least 13,000 “Child Abduction Warning Notices” were sent out by police between 2008 and 2025 in a supposed effort to “disrupt” child rape grooming gangs. However, it is possible that the true figure is much higher, given inconsistent record-keeping by police forces.
The warning letter system, the paper noted, was started in the wake of revelations concerning the predominantly Pakistani Muslim child rape gang scandals in Rotherham and Rochdale.
The investigation noted that the first instance of the term “Child Abduction Warning Notices” as a part of a national strategy to confront sexual abuse was in a 2011 report written by Sir Keir Starmer when he was serving at the helm of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
In one notable example, some 220 warning letters were reportedly handed out to suspected members of a Newcastle grooming gang as a part of Northumbria Police’s Operation Sanctuary.
Despite police forces using such warning letters for nearly two decades, there has never been any comprehensive study into their effectiveness in deterring child sex offenders or the likelihood of their issuance leading to prosecutions.
Former Manchester detective turned grooming gang whistleblower Maggie Oliver told the Express that she had witnessed police colleagues using the warning letters as a means of making investigations “go away”.
“I worked on a case where we had identified 97 child abusers that investigation should have led to serious charges of child rape on a pretty industrial scale,” she said. “I expected multiple charges of rape against possibly dozens of men. But [instead they] warned a couple of men under the child abduction warning notices. My opinion is they were used to get rid of a job.”
Reform UK Shadow Home Secretary Zia Yusuf said the report demonstrated that Prime Minister Starmer’s position is “completely untenable”, adding: “Instead of fighting for the full force of the law against vile grooming gang predators, Keir Starmer presided over a system that sent out weak and useless ‘warning letters’ to paedophiles.”
Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy added that “serious questions must be answered about the policies pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service during Keir Starmer’s tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions, and whether those policies contributed to this catastrophic failure.”
Questions have long been raised over Starmer’s potential role in the effective cover-up of grooming gangs during his tenure as the nation’s top prosecutor, with critics frequently citing the initial decision in 2009 not to prosecute a Rochdale grooming gang over the supposed unreliability of a victim. This decision was later reversed by Nazir Afzal, chief prosecutor for northwest England, an appointee of Starmer, who determined the victim to be credible.
Beyond Starmer, many in his left-wing Labour Party are believed to have been directly implicated in the failures to confront Islamic grooming gangs, with local officials in predominantly Labour-controlled areas of the country having been frequently found to have ignored child sex abuse for fear of appearing racist or stoking local ethnic tensions. Victims were often branded by local officials as “prostitutes” despite being under the age of consent.
Although Starmer initially opposed a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, accusing those in favour of a public investigation of jumping on the “bandwagon of the far-right“ and even whipping his own backbenchers last year against voting for an inquiry, public pressure eventually forced the PM to backtrack and allow an inquiry to go ahead.
However, the controversy surrounding the issue has only continued, with prominent grooming victims accusing the government of a further cover up last month by scrapping the inquiry’s survivors advisory panel.
