Birmingham and Wales Named as Next Regions in National Grooming Gangs Inquiry

The statutory independent inquiry examining child sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs has confirmed that Birmingham and Wales will become the next two areas subject to detailed local investigation. The announcement expands the geographic scope of a national probe that is already running targeted studies in several English regions, and signals that the inquiry intends to examine a broad cross-section of communities where authorities have been accused of failing to protect vulnerable children.

The inquiry is chaired by Baroness Anne Longfield, a former children's commissioner for England who has spent much of her career focused on safeguarding and youth welfare. Her appointment to lead the process was intended to bring both professional expertise and public credibility to a subject that has generated intense political and emotional controversy over more than a decade.

Local investigations have already been confirmed for Oldham in Greater Manchester, as well as Bradford and Keighley in West Yorkshire, and London. The addition of Birmingham and Wales means the inquiry will now scrutinise a major metropolitan area in the Midlands and an entire devolved nation, reflecting concerns that grooming gang activity has not been confined to a handful of high-profile towns in northern England.

According to the inquiry's own framework, areas are selected using a set of criteria rather than by random sampling. Investigators consider how victims and survivors were treated at the moment they came forward to report abuse, and whether earlier opportunities to prevent harm were missed by police, councils, social services or other public bodies. These factors help determine where systemic failures may have been most severe or most instructive for national reform.

The inquiry holds statutory powers, which means it can compel individuals and institutions to provide evidence and account for their conduct. Specifically, it can require them to explain what they did or did not do to protect children from being sexually abused. It is also tasked with assessing the nature and scale of abuse in each area it examines, rather than limiting itself to individual cases that have already reached the courts.

The wider process was announced by former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in June 2025, giving it a formal mandate at the highest level of government. It began its operational work in April this year, backed by a budget of £65 million, a figure that reflects the volume of evidence, the number of witnesses and the complexity of reviewing decades of institutional conduct across multiple agencies.

The inquiry has not been without difficulty. It encountered turbulence when abuse survivors publicly called on former safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to resign, underscoring the deep distrust that many victims feel towards the political and bureaucratic systems that were supposed to protect them. Such moments illustrate the pressure the inquiry faces to demonstrate independence and to avoid being perceived as another exercise in institutional self-protection.

Birmingham's inclusion is likely to attract particular attention. As one of the largest local authority areas in England, it has a complex web of children's services, multi-agency safeguarding arrangements and a diverse population. Any findings there could have implications for how councils nationwide handle the identification of grooming networks.

Wales presents a different set of challenges altogether. Child protection there operates within a devolved policy landscape, with the Welsh government responsible for many relevant services. Examining an entire nation rather than a single town will require investigators to compare practice across rural and urban areas and to consider how Welsh institutions interacted with UK-wide policing and prosecution bodies.

The selection of these locations also carries a signal for other parts of the country. Areas not yet named may wonder whether they will eventually be drawn into the process, and local authorities in the meantime face questions about whether their own safeguarding records would withstand scrutiny. The inquiry's criteria effectively place past treatment of survivors and missed preventive chances at the centre of the assessment.

For survivors, the expansion of the inquiry represents both an opportunity and a test. Many have waited years for their accounts to be taken seriously, and some have expressed frustration at the pace of previous reviews. The inquiry's power to compel evidence could unlock documents and testimony that were previously inaccessible, but only if institutions cooperate fully and if survivors feel safe enough to participate.

The political dimension is unavoidable. Grooming gang abuse has been the subject of intense media coverage, parliamentary debate and local protest, often framed around questions of ethnicity, policing priorities and political correctness. The inquiry will need to address the nature and scale of abuse without allowing its findings to be distorted by wider culture-war arguments, a balance that has proven difficult for earlier reviews.

Baroness Longfield's team has said that the Birmingham and Wales investigations will follow the same model as the existing local studies, gathering evidence from victims, public bodies and experts before producing area-specific conclusions. Those conclusions are expected to feed into the inquiry's overall recommendations, which could shape national policy on safeguarding, policing and support services for years to come.

The £65 million budget, while substantial, will be stretched across multiple investigations, a national evidence-gathering exercise and the production of final reports. How efficiently the inquiry manages its resources will affect how many other areas can be examined and how quickly survivors receive answers that many of them have been seeking for much of their adult lives.

The announcement that Birmingham and Wales will be next is therefore more than an administrative update. It widens the inquiry's lens to include a major English city and an entire devolved nation, deepening the evidential base on which any future national reforms will rest. The coming months will reveal whether the process can maintain the confidence of survivors while compelling institutions to confront uncomfortable truths about their own failures.