Andy Burnham’s Real Record On The Pakistani Rape Gangs

How The Would Be Prime Minister Is Eyebrows Deep in The Biggest Cover Up In British History

Andy Burnham wants to be the MP for Makerfield. After that, he wants to be Prime Minister. So on 28 May he stood in front of voters and gave them his version of the rape gangs.

I initiated the biggest review into this issue that the country has seen. And that was when I was looking towards the issue, but lots of other politicians, in fact the vast majority, were just looking in the other direction. That review into Manchester, but with subsequent reviews into Oldham and Rochdale, and the wide-ranging review has led to major police investigations being reopened. It has led to arrests, charges, and convictions of perpetrators who would otherwise have walked free. Now those are the facts. You can look them up, that’s what I did, and I am happy to account on every doorstep.

He acted immediately, he said. He commissioned the biggest review the country has ever seen. It led to arrests, charges and convictions. Other politicians looked away. He did not. Then came the line he should regret. Those are the facts, he told them. Look them up.

So I did. I read his own report. It exposes him.

Five Claims. Five Falsehoods.

He said he acted. He did. He reached for the feeblest tool in the box. Children were being raped across his city and Burnham launched a review that could not force one person to turn up, answer a question, or hand over a file. It was a fire engine with flashing lights yet with no water, no ladder and not not a single fireman aboard capable of rescuing anyone from a burning building. Burnham calls it leadership. I've previously likened it to the emperor's new clothes. You decide who is telling the truth.

Once agian, Burnham describes his intervention as the biggest review the country has seen. To Burnham, size matters. I see it differently. As if length were the same as teeth. He could have asked for an inquiry with the power to drag the truth out of people. He picked the version that had to ask nicely from the people involved in looking the other way to the gang rape of little girls and then take no for an answer from those complicit in selling children to maintain community relations. Biggest is not the word I would use.

Burnham said it led to arrests, charges and convictions. He avoids sharing how these convictions include the work of other people's actions, in older cases, years before he commissioned anything. In my own home town of Oldham, the operation his own review triggered has caught almost nobody. In neighbouring Rochdale, at least one survivor it should have protected, is dead.

He said other politicians looked away while he looked towards the issue. He looked towards a process built so it could not see. Then he looked away himself, while his own party used his review to call survivors and whistleblowers liars and tried to use Burnham's reviews as reason not to pursue a statutory national inquiry.

He said look up the facts. Here they are. Ask Andy Burnham if I am lying? And why, after taking to X to issue a statement about me and essentially threaten me, he has refused to meet with me in public to defend his actual record.

He Knew the Scale. He Chose the Response.

Burnham says the BBC documentary The Betrayed Girls moved him to act. Take him at his word. That film told him exactly what he was dealing with.

It laid Rochdale out in full. The women abused as children spoke for the first time. Sara Rowbotham, the health worker who logged warning after warning and was ignored. Maggie Oliver, the detective who walked out of Greater Manchester Police rather than stay quiet. The whole subject of that film was institutions that knew children were being gang raped and chose to protect themselves instead.

He watched it. Then he found out how far it ran.

His reviews would reach beyond Rochdale into Manchester and Oldham. The Manchester strand uncovered Victoria Agoglia. Fifteen years old. In the care of the council. She told her grandmother that men were injecting her with heroin and raping her. Her grandmother phoned the authorities. She phoned them again. She phoned them again. Nobody came. Victoria died in 2003.

The investigation into her death, Operation Augusta, found around ninety-seven men of interest. It judged that sixteen of a sample of twenty-five children were probably being sexually exploited. Then it was shut down in 2005.

That is what Burnham knew. Not a rumour. Not one town. A pattern of institutions burying the rape of children to save their own skins, confirmed on national television by the very people who had tried to stop it.

He held the powers of Police and Crime Commissioner. He could have gone to the government and demanded a statutory inquiry, the kind that forces witnesses to attend, forces documents into the open, puts people under oath. He chose a review that could do none of that. His own report admits it. The authors say plainly they offer no opinion on whether anything they were told was even true. They could only write down what the guilty chose to hand them.

His Own Report Proved the System Was Broken. He Rebuilt It Anyway.

The first part, on Operation Augusta, landed in January 2020. It should have stopped him dead.

His expert team of reviewers wanted to know who closed Augusta down, and why. They asked the police for the notes of the meeting that ended it. Could not be found was the response. Minutes of a meeting had been lost. They then asked for the minutes of the gold group meeting at Manchester Town Hall the same day. Neither the police nor the council could produce a copy. Yet the senior officer's own policy book confirmed senior officers had been in the room.

Some of the officers responsible for shutting it down simply refused to be interviewed.

A review cannot make a silent officer talk. It cannot make a missing minute reappear. Burnham held that proof in his hands in January 2020. He ought to have known right then what was taking place. Instead he commissioned three more reviews built exactly the same way. They were to take 7 years to complete.

The Part He Didn’t Plan, and Couldn’t Control

Burnham never explains this next bit.

He designed his review around three things he chose to look at. The closure of Augusta in Manchester. The Rochdale investigations. A look at current practice across Greater Manchester. Two of those were safe ground. Augusta and Rochdale reopened old cases, proved Oliver and Rowbotham right, and pointed the finger at the police for failures a decade old. The third looked forward, not back. He picked the ground because the ground was safe. Lessons had been learned.

Oldham was never part of that plan.

It was bolted on in November 2019, more than two years later, when the leader of Oldham Council wrote and asked for it. Burnham agreed. It became so-called part two, with its own separate terms of reference.

And that is what undoes him. Oldham Council went to Burnham after their own investigator ran away following public pressure. Then council leader Sean Fielding needed help and so he went to his Labour Party pal Andy Burnham. An Assurance Review followed. The terms of reference were agreed with the very council and police force under examination.

The Conclusion Was Written Before the Evidence Was Read

The Oldham Assurance Review's headline finding, the one every politician has hidden behind since, is that there was no evidence senior managers or councillors covered anything up. Read the actual report and that line falls apart.

It falls apart first because the review was banned from looking. The terms of reference shut it into the years 2011 to 2014 and a fixed list of allegations. The report itself names what it was told to leave out. Links between the council and organised crime. The safeguarding of mosques and madrassah teachers. The claim that Oldham politicians were involved in postal vote fraud. A review forbidden from examining organised crime and political corruption cannot then announce there was no organised cover-up. It was built so it could never find one.

It falls apart again on the thing nobody disputed. The report confirms children as young as thirteen and fourteen were abused while visiting shisha bars. It confirms the same children were still being failed two years later. What it could not explain was why nobody stopped it. Because in the same breath it calls Oldham's services strategically ahead of other councils and praises the investment of senior officers and councillors. Strategically ahead while children were gang raped. Both lines sit on the same page.

Then it convicts the institutions in words it refuses to use about its own verdict. On Sophie, raped at twelve after being turned away from a police station, the report finds the council and police were more concerned with covering up their failures than admitting the harm done to her. Covering up. The report's own phrase, about the very bodies it then clears.

It documents Offender A. We know him as Shabir Ahmed, ringleader of the Rochdale Grooming Gang. It confirms he was a council employee with access to children. He was also a member of the Oldham Labour Party. Eventually convicted of dozens of rapes, warning after warning was missed from 2005 to 2012. Crimes he committed were not recorded. His employer was apparently never told. Strategy meetings were never held. A case was closed within days. The reviewers say plainly that following procedure might have spared his later victims.

The Assurance Review also records that the council's own licensing panel gave taxi licences to men convicted of serious sexual offences against children. One of them went on to assault a young passenger in 2015. The reviewers do not disclose the age of the young passenger. I'll leave it to you to decide why. The judge at his trial asked why he had ever held a licence. Was he also a member of the Labour Party?

And then there is Councillor Y. A Labour councillor. A school governor. Questioned by police in 2007 over the alleged rape of a young woman. He was never charged, and he denies it. But look at what the council did next. The report finds the schools were shut out of the child protection process, a serious failing given he had children and governed a school. No proper strategy meeting for over ten months. And the reason, the concern to keep the investigation confidential, given his prominent position in the council, overrode the requirement to involve the people who knew the children best. The Labour whip was removed and he resigned as a councillor in 2008. A man's standing was protected. The children around him were not.

Here Is The Part That Should End The Argument.

The team picked 72 people to interview. They sent them the questions in advance. An administrator wrote down what each one said. Then, in the report's own words, the interviewees were allowed to amend and validate that record before it counted. Read that again. The people whose conduct was under examination got to edit the account of their own conduct before it went in the file.

No oath. No challenge. No one put a document in front of a witness and made them explain it. Several police officers refused to be interviewed at all and sent in written statements instead. Some council staff just ignored the request. And the team admits it never saw the police's own source records, which it concedes shaped the conclusions it could reach about the police.

This is not how you find the truth. This is how you avoid it. You do not catch a liar by posting them the questions a week early and letting them rewrite their answers afterwards.

This was never an investigation. It was a transcription service for the people it was meant to be holding to account.

Labour Politicians Then Weaponised It.

Maggie Oliver is grateful to Burnham for the Augusta and Rochdale reviews. They proved her right.

Oldham she will not defend. She pulled herself and her foundation out of it. She has called it little more than a cover-up. This is not an enemy talking. This is the woman whose name Burnham still uses to explain why he ever acted.

Burnham wasted the chance to give a voice to grooming gang victims

Over the next month, we’re going to hear a lot from Andy Burnham about his role in rooting out the Asian grooming gangs and getting justice for the countless children who were their victims.

Daily MailMaggie Oliver

The two reviewers who wrote the earlier parts went further. They resigned from the final strand, saying the police had blocked them from documents and from survivors. The people best placed to judge the work walked away from it. Despite this, Andy Burnham continued to front the reports. And then this happened.

At 10:42 on the morning the Oldham report was published, three Labour politicians put their names to a single statement. Debbie Abrahams. Jim McMahon. Angela Rayner, who would go on to become Deputy Prime Minister. They called it one of the most comprehensive safeguarding reviews ever undertaken. Then they reached for the line they wanted.

"This independent review also addressed head on the false and often politically motivated conspiracy theories that claimed grooming gangs were operating under the protection of senior politicians. The review was clear that there is no basis for these accusations, and we are pleased that the report draws a line under this."

Read who is speaking. Politicians. Citing a review that cleared politicians of a charge it had been forbidden to investigate. Telling the public that anyone who said politicians protected grooming gangs was a liar.

Burnham commissioned that review. He promoted it. He defended it. Then he watched his own party turn it into a weapon against survivors and the people fighting for them, and he said nothing.

No One Was Held Accountable. Not One.

Now the claim that should anger Makerfield most. Arrests, charges and convictions.

Pull the two halves apart, because Burnham needs you to confuse them.

The men who raped children should be convicted. Some have been. Good. But that was never the charge against him. The charge is about the officials and the politicians who sat over these failures. And not one of them has answered for anything. No councillor. No senior officer. No official charged. None disciplined.

The one formal attempt at accountability, the referral of three former senior officers over the Augusta closure, collapsed in 2022. It collapsed for the same reason everything else did. Missing records. Officers who would not talk. The very things a review can never force.

Even his convictions will not bear his weight. The numbers he quotes are region-wide totals, leaning on the old Rochdale prosecutions that started in 2012, years before his Oldham review and nothing to do with it. Operation Sherwood, the investigation his Oldham review actually triggered, has caught almost nobody from the historic networks. The ninety-seven men from the Manchester investigation have never, on the public record, been brought to justice. Arrests in an election year are also not convictions.

So ask him, should your paths cross, 3 simple questions.

1. How many children across Greater Manchester were gang raped? Surely seven years of investigation results in a number?
2. How many members of the rape gangs have been successfully prosecuted as a direct result of his non statutory reports?
3. How many public officials and police officers have gone to prison?

Justice Didn't Fail. It Was Never Delivered.

A conviction is not protection. Ask Charlotte Tetley.

Charlotte survived the Rochdale gangs. In 2023 she was forced out of her own town so that one of her convicted abusers could move back into it. She lost her home. She lost her support network. She told the services, over and over, that she was going to kill herself.

In June 2024 she was reviewed every day for a week. Every review said she needed to be admitted. Then she was taken off the hospital bed list before a qualified clinician had even seen her.

On 24 September 2024 Charlotte sat down on the railway tracks at Macclesfield and waited for the train. A coroner has since issued a formal warning that the failures around her death will kill others unless something changes.

That is what Burnham's "justice delivered" looks like once the cameras leave. The reviews were the end of his interest. They were not the end of the suffering.

He Refused the Only Tool That Could Expose the Truth

When the reviews could not reach the truth, the next step was obvious. Go to the government. Demand a statutory inquiry with the power to force the witnesses and the documents into the open.

He never did.

For seven years he defended the reviews instead. Oldham Council asked the Home Office for a full inquiry. Jess Phillips refused. Survivors kept speaking and campaigners continued exposing the flaws in Burnham's reports. All this time, Burnham kept silent. He never admitted to the serious shortcomings in his rape gang reports.

Only in January 2025, after Elon Musk forced Oldham onto the world stage and his own party's safeguarding minister had already rejected Oldham's request, did Burnham say he was not opposed to an inquiry. Even then he wanted a small one, leaning on the same broken local reviews. Even then he called the people demanding more distasteful.

He did not lead the call. He was dragged to it. Late. And he asked for less.

He Fought for Truth at Hillsborough. Then Blocked It in Manchester.

Andy Burnham is the man who forced the truth out of Hillsborough. He spent years saying that establishment cover-ups are only ever cracked open by statutory powers and a legal duty of candour. He wants that duty written into law.

For Hillsborough, he demanded the full force of the law. For the gang rape of thousands of little White girls from across Greater Manchester, he chose a process that could compel no one. Why?

Burnham calls it the biggest review the country has ever seen. I'll let you decide if it was the biggest cover up the country has ever seen and whether he didn't just fail to find the truth, he actually built something that never could.

I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry.

You won’t see me on the BBC. You won’t read my work in the legacy press. That’s not an accident. I take this to a place from where there is no coming back.

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