The Metropolitan Police has reportedly identified more than 4,000 grooming gang cases that could require fresh investigation.
Scotland Yard has been conducting a wide-ranging review of group-based sexual abuse allegations in London dating back to 2010, following concerns that some offenders may never have been brought to justice.
According to the report, more than 12,000 alleged incidents were recorded by the Met over that period, with the audit finding that around one in three may need to be reopened.
The findings could mark a significant expansion in the force’s handling of historic grooming gang investigations, and come after London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan previously said there was “no indication” that grooming gangs were operating in the capital.
A video from January 2025, widely circulated by his critics, showed Sir Sadiq declining to give a direct answer on the scale of the issue while appearing before the London Assembly’s police and crime committee.
During the session, Susan Hall, the Conservative leader on the Greater London Authority, asked the mayor how many rape gangs were operating in London. Sir Sadiq repeatedly asked her to clarify what she meant by the term.
His response prompted criticism from Conservative and Reform politicians, as well as allegations from some campaigners and victims that the issue was being downplayed.
The Mayor of London has repeatedly rejected suggestions that the capital has experienced child sexual exploitation on the same scale as cases uncovered in towns including Rochdale and Rotherham.
The potential major escalation of the Met’s policing of historic grooming gang cases comes despite Sir Sadiq Khan previously claiming there was ‘no indication’ grooming gangs were operating in the capital
The Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has warned that he will need more resources and officers to deal with all the cases which are now being looked at again
He has even consistently refused to use the term ‘grooming gang’, which some say has hindered efforts to support victims.
But last June Baroness Casey published a scathing review of the response to grooming gangs, concluding the criminal justice system had been letting down victims for decades.
The report found the gangs were far more widespread, organised and underreported than the Mayor previously admitted.
And alarmingly, the report also found local authorities and other official bodies had shied away from tackling ‘ethnicity or cultural factors’ in grooming gangs ‘for fear of appearing racist’.
Her findings prompted Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to order the creation of a national inquiry, with former England children’s commissioner Baroness Anne Longfield announced as its chair last December.
The report also led to the National Crime Agency (NCA), known as Britain’s FBI, setting up Operation Beaconport to identify criminal cases that had been closed prematurely.
Police forces nationwide were asked to look again at reports they had received of sexual abuse in which there was more than one alleged perpetrator.
The Met’s initial audit uncovered around 12,000 reports, while a more in-depth review highlighted more than 4,000 where the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) or police had made a decision to take no further action.
Susan Hall, the Conservative leader on the Greater London Authority (GLA), welcomed the fact that the grooming gangs problem in London was finally being noticed
Those cases have now been passed to the NCA, which is expected to announce in the coming weeks how many must be reopened, according to the Telegraph.
Ms Hall welcomed the fact that light was finally being shed on the problem in London.
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She told the paper that ‘the mayor’s response was utterly disgraceful’ and that it had been like getting ‘blood out of a stone’.
The Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has warned that he will need more resources and officers to deal with the caseload.
But while many of the abusers identified in other parts of the country are predominantly Pakistani Muslim men, the issue in London is thought to be more complex.
Not all the 4,000 cases identified by the Met fit the typical grooming gang model, with perpetrators and victims coming from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds.
A source told the Telegraph the cases that had been reviewed were a mixture of intrafamilial, online and in-person abuse.
But there is a growing mountain of evidence that grooming gangs are still operating in the capital, with a BBC investigation in February finding that women and girls as young as 14 are being raped and forced into sex work.
The broadcaster conducted interviews with five survivors of gang-based violence, showing that girls are being groomed into trading weapons, stealing phones and dealing drugs by groups of men.
Some are being raped as ‘payment’ for unpaid drug debts accumulated by the gangs controlling them, while others are being groomed and forced into sex work by the organised crime groups.
The gangs of men are from a range of different ethnicities, including white, and are exploiting women and young girls across England’s capital city.
A spokesman for Sir Sadiq in a statement strongly rejected any suggestion that he had sought to cover up issues related to child sexual exploitation in London.
He said the mayor ‘welcomed’ the reinvestigation of the cases, and had ‘been clear we must leave no stone unturned’.
The statement added that Sir Sadiq believes the groomed victims have not only suffered terrible abuse at the hands of the perpetrators but have been woefully let down by the authorities meant to protect them from harm.
It explained that the mayor had strengthened the protection of children from exploitation by investing in specialist services, such as the £2.4m for specialist support for survivors of child sexual exploitation.
The mayor also commissioned a 2023 inspection of the Met’s child protection work by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, which found that it ‘isn’t doing enough’ to protect children.
The Met Dept Asst Commissioner Kevin Southworth said the force was fully committed to engaging with the National Inquiry and the Operation Beaconport review into past cases led by the NCA and the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC).
He said it would work to deliver justice for the victim-survivors involved and urged anyone with any information to come forward.
It is not just the Mayor of London who has struggled to come to terms with the industrial-scale sexual exploitation of thousands of young women and girls across the country. It has been a thorny issue for Labour nationally.
Last year, Sir Keir said he would not tolerate politicians jumping on the ‘bandwagon of the far right’ and those seeking a national inquiry were ‘desperate for attention.’
He ordered his MPs to vote against a national inquiry before then performing a humiliating u-turn and commissioning one.
Lucy Powell, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, also said demanding for an inquiry was ‘dog whistle politics’ – comments she later apologised for.
The full truth about the national scandal of the grooming gangs likely won’t be laid bare until the official inquiry publishes its findings, set to conclude no later than March 2029.
In its terms of reference published in March, the inquiry said it would ‘investigate how grooming gangs operated and how institutions, including police, local authorities, health services, social care services, and schools, responded to abuse’.
The inquiry will also ‘examine why children were so often disbelieved, dismissed, or blamed for their own abuse’.
It added: ‘The inquiry will directly examine whether the ethnicity, culture or religion of either perpetrators or victims influenced patterns of offending, and whether these factors shaped the institutional response.
‘These are questions that previous reviews chose not to address. This inquiry will not avoid them.’
But the solicitors representing victims of child sex grooming and the survivors remain unhappy about the scope of the inquiry – which is currently limited to just five areas.
One lawyer, David Greenwood, said he was ‘very concerned’ the ‘Labour-run Home Office’ will be able to influence which locations are examined and fears there could be ‘perceptions of bias’.
