London Grooming Gangs: The Scandal Khan Said Didn’t Exist
Why a 9,000-case review blows apart City Hall’s complacency
For years, Londoners were told there was no evidence of organised “grooming gangs” in the capital. When the subject did break the surface at City Hall, it was often treated as something impolite to talk about, or reduced to a row about language rather than a serious conversation about child protection.
Now the Metropolitan Police are reviewing 9,000 historic child sexual exploitation (CSE) cases in London, stretching back 15 years, to see how many should never have been closed in the first place. That review alone is an admission that something has gone very badly wrong.
And it raises a blunt question: what exactly has Sadiq Khan been doing all this time?
“Do we even have grooming gangs in London, Mr Mayor?”
At the start of the year, Conservative London Assembly member Susan Hall used Mayor’s Question Time to ask a very simple question: are there grooming gangs operating in London?
She asked it not once, but nine times. Khan refused to give a straight yes or no. Instead, he pressed her to define what she meant by “those sorts of gangs”, asking her to “spell it out” before he would answer.
Hall, clearly exasperated, pointed to the well-known examples in Rotherham and Bradford: groups of men grooming and raping underage girls, often in budget hotels, taxis and back rooms. She asked again: do we have that problem here?
Khan’s response was not to level with Londoners. He questioned the framing of the question and suggested he wasn’t clear what kind of gangs she was talking about. Commentators later accused him of stonewalling a legitimate safeguarding question and trying to turn the exchange into a row about terminology rather than victims. The Spectator
Rather than concern about the victims he turned it into a race-baiting event.
Fast-forward to autumn. The Met announces its review of 9,000 CSE cases. The Mayor is suddenly keen to stress how “complex” exploitation in London is, and how the capital’s situation doesn’t map neatly onto the grooming gang scandals in northern towns.
It sounds a lot like someone trying to square years of minimisation with a scandal that has finally broken cover.
A scandal that didn’t start yesterday
The grooming gang crisis is not new. Nationally, the first major trials in places like Rochdale went through the courts more than a decade ago.
What has become clear, through successive reports, is that:
victims were often dismissed or disbelieved
authorities were reluctant to act robustly
and fear of being accused of racism played a role in shutting down or slowing investigations in some areas. AP News+1
That is exactly what Sadiq Khan attempted to do with Susan Hall. Shut her down by race baiting her or daring her to say it was. majority Pakistani Grooming gangs so that he could then accuse her of racism.
London was never magically exempt from those dynamics.
Whistleblowers like former Met detective John Wedger have been raising alarms for years. Back in the mid-2000s he was involved in an operation targeting a well-known prostitute in London who was suspected of using children and linked to organised crime. Wedger says he uncovered evidence of children being pimped out in budget hotels, and that some officers knew it was happening. wanttoknow.info
According to his account, when he filed intelligence reports, a senior officer warned that he had “dug too deep” and told him that if he spoke out, he would be “thrown to the wolves”. He later alleges he was forced into early retirement and threatened for refusing to let the matter drop. wanttoknow.info+1
Whatever one thinks of every detail of Wedger’s story, the broad picture fits what we now know nationally: systemic failures, institutional self-protection, and children treated as collateral damage.
Khan’s record: evasions, delays and missed chances
Sadiq Khan did not create the grooming gangs scandal. But he did inherit a capital where exploitation and rape gangs were already an acknowledged national problem – and where police and councils had a known history of failure.
On that basis, you would expect a Mayor who is serious about child protection to:
commission an independent inquiry into London’s historic grooming cases
demand full transparency from the Met and City Hall’s own policing bodies
and speak plainly about the problem, even when the racial or cultural aspects are uncomfortable.
Instead, this is what we got:
Refusal to answer basic questions. At Mayor’s Question Time, Khan repeatedly dodged giving a direct yes/no answer when asked whether grooming gangs existed in London, insisting he didn’t understand the question.
Opposition to an inquiry focused on London. Earlier this year, City Hall Conservatives proposed spending £4.5m on an independent inquiry into the exploitation of children in London, explicitly referencing grooming gangs. The London Assembly – dominated by Labour and its allies – rejected the call.
Dismissive tone about concerns. In more recent exchanges, Khan has been accused by Assembly members and victims’ advocates of “taking the mickey” out of those raising the alarm, by implying that worries about grooming gangs in London were overblown or ill-informed. The Times+1
All of this matters because political tone from the top filters down. If City Hall treats the subject as something slightly embarrassing, or something you tiptoe around for fear of causing offence, that sets the weather for everyone beneath it.
The 9,000-case review: proof the system failed
The Met’s review of 9,000 child exploitation cases, covering a 15-year period, is now being carried out under a national operation. Many of those cases involve London. The force has already indicated that a significant number may require re-investigation.
That alone is an admission that:
victims were not taken seriously
serious crimes may have been wrongly closed
and patterns of group-based exploitation were not properly joined up.
Khan now insists that “no stone should be left unturned” in getting to the truth and supporting victims.
But that begs a simple question:
Why did it take a national outcry, a government-ordered review and years of pressure from whistleblowers and campaigners to get to this point?
A late burst of activity doesn’t erase years of denial
Defenders of the Mayor will point to new funding packages, including a £2.4m support scheme for victims and survivors of child sexual exploitation, and to wider spending on violence and exploitation services. London City Hall+2The Times+2
Support for victims is welcome. It is also the bare minimum.
The real test of leadership is whether you:
acknowledge problems early,
speak honestly about them,
and push institutions into uncomfortable territory when that’s what protecting children requires.
On grooming gangs, Khan’s record is the opposite: years of equivocation, semantic games in the Assembly chamber, political resistance to an inquiry focused on London, and only now – when the scale of the historic failure is impossible to ignore – a sudden urgency about “strengthening child protection”.
It is not good enough.
This is about children, not tribes
One reason this issue has been mishandled, nationally and in London, is that it has been turned into a culture-war football.
Some on the Left have been far more anxious about being seen to feed “the far right” than about the girls who were raped. Some on the Right have been more interested in weaponising the issue for clicks than in patiently fixing broken institutions.
The truth is uncomfortable for everyone:
some organised grooming networks have involved men from particular ethnic backgrounds,
offenders also come from many other backgrounds,
and authorities have repeatedly failed to protect children, for reasons that include incompetence, prejudice, ideology and fear of being called racist. AP News+1
None of that is an excuse for City Hall to pretend the problem didn’t exist in London, or to play word-games in public when asked basic safeguarding questions.
Where accountability starts
If London is serious about confronting this scandal, three things have to happen:
Full transparency on the 9,000-case review. Londoners deserve to know how many cases were mishandled, why they were closed, and what patterns emerge.
An inquiry focused on London. National inquiries are important, but they cannot be an excuse for City Hall to dodge scrutiny of what happened in this city over the last 15–20 years.
Political accountability at the top. When a Mayor spends years denying or downplaying a problem that later explodes on his watch, the buck stops with him.
On that final point, my view is simple:
Sadiq Khan should go.
A leader who cannot talk honestly about grooming gangs, who resists scrutiny of historic failures, and who treats legitimate questions as a political nuisance has forfeited the right to claim he is “keeping Londoners safe” – least of all our children.
What you can do
Anger on its own changes nothing. Pressure does.
I’ve drafted a polite but firm email/letter template that you can send to City Hall, your Assembly Member or your MP, calling for:
Khan’s removal,
a London-focused inquiry, and
full transparency on the Met review.
👉 You can download it here: Template For City Hall
My recommendation is to send it to Susan Hall. Whose email address can be found here: if you do not feel comfortable sending it to the London Assembly (anyone can contact them from anywhere in the country) then send it to your MP.
If you use it:
add a few lines in your own words at the top
and send it on to anyone you know who cares about child protection.
The scandal of London’s grooming gangs is finally breaking the surface. The only question now is whether we are prepared to keep the pressure on – until the people who failed our children are held to account.
I am going to send it but there is power in numbers. I hope you will also send it. Demand his resignation or dismissal!