Opposition councillor accuses Rotherham Council of “whitewash” over child sexual exploitation review

Councillor Jill Thompson asked at last week’s full council meeting how many CSE victims had been recorded in Rotherham since 2017, and when an up to date CSE action plan will be published.

Councillor Victoria Cusworth, cabinet member for children and young people told the meeting: “since the beginning of 2017 up until April 8, 2022, there have been 584 individual children and young people that children and young people’s services have worked with, where it was believed that there was a risk of CSE.”

“This does not, of course, mean that all of those children had been abused, and certainly not that they made a disclosure.

“Nearly half of those children were regarded as being at low risk, with 78 considered at high risk.

“There may also be children who do not come into contact with services. ”

Coun Cusworth added that following a motion submitted by the Conservative group in November, the council had asked the independent chair of the safeguarding board to “review the partnership strategy to tackle and prevent child exploitation.”

The motion demanded on the group’s behalf that the council “acknowledges that the true scale of CSE in Rotherham is not, and cannot be known at present due to reactive policies and under-reporting, and that CSE may be occurring on the same scale as in the past”

“That strategy, supported by an operational action plan is the relevant document in terms of responding to child sexual exploitation in Rotherham,” added Coun Cusworth.

“It is the responsibility of the multi-agency child exploitation delivery group, and you can find the strategy on their website.

“Those documents are not a direct response to the recommendation of the Jay and Casey reports, which were of course the subject of the council’s intervention and improvement plan over a number of years.

“The first part of the review that we asked for has been conducted, and the independent reviewers have provided substantial assurance.

“The second part reviewing the strategy is now underway, and once that review is complete in the next few weeks, I would suggest that the documents are referred to members for formal consideration through scrutiny.”

However, Coun Thompson said that “Without proper assurance, we can’t be certain that the problems professor jay identified within RMBC haven’t either continued or re-emerged.

Coun Thomspon added that the outcome of the review was “entirely expected” by the Conservative group, adding: “RMBC would deny there had been any problems.”

“It was just a whitewash.

“Where is the up to date CSE plan aligned to the recommendations from the Jay and Casey report?

“When I looked online that actual plan was never ever completed, so it’s showing as incomplete.”

Coun Cusworth added: “I’m not here to debate the substantial assurances that the independent review found in part one of that report.

“When the commissioners left Rotherham and were confident in the actions that we’d taken, and how far things had improved around children’s services, and scrutiny etcetera, they were confident that the works that hey’d wanted to be done had been done,a nd they left with confidence in that.

“Scrutiny is probably the best route go through to access working documents.”