ARE COUNCILS ACROSS ENGLAND AND WALES BEING HELD TO RANSOM BY THE PAKISTANI TAXI RAPE GANG RING?

In 2001 a man was convicted of indecently assaulting and abducting a 13-year-old girl in his private hire car. He served 18 months in prison. In 2005 Oldham Council handed him a taxi licence.

Oldham Council let him drive children for ten years before it eventually revoked his licence in January 2015. No one knows how many children he abused before the council was eventually forced to act.

This example is not unique. The same council licensed another man in 2003, two years after he was convicted of indecent assault. In September 2014 the council’s head of licensing reported five licensed drivers to the Labour cabinet member responsible. The report set out their previous convictions, including sexual offences. After a screening exercise with Greater Manchester Police and the safeguarding board, one man was sent to a licensing panel and lost his licence.

The council’s own lawyers had advised it not to go back over licences it had already handed out because the drivers would appeal. The other four kept driving.

The next year one of those four men sexually assaulted a child in his taxi. When he was convicted in 2017, the judge asked why he had ever been given a licence.

I’ll tell you why he had been given a licence.

1. Pakistani taxi drivers are protected by Pakistani politicians who sit on the licensing committees. In many instances, due to the clan based structure of this community, both are related. What is distant to you and me by western norms is close kin to them.
2. These Pakistani taxi drivers are organised. In every town and city across the land, they control tens of thousands of votes. Politicians do deals with them just as Labour do a deal with the unions.
3. Intervene before you have been forced to and you open a can of worms. It is likely tens of thousands of taxi drivers will have their licences removed. And the ethnic correlation of the drivers who have lost their licences will be unavoidable.

Almost no council in England and Wales will act against the Pakistani Taxi Rape Gang Ring because they are effectively held to ransom by it. Which is why the government must intervene. Except it won't, not in the way it needs to anyway.

And for those of you who are asking, no, I am not going to let this go. If we want to stop the rape gangs and protect our children, we need to take drastic action in both how our children’s homes are run and how taxis operate.

In June 2025 Baroness Casey told the government that taxi licensing was putting children at risk and that it had to act immediately. The government accepted her recommendation in full. What it has done since is write a power to set national standards into an Act and leave the same councillors sat on the same licensing committees.

Now tell me something. Where is Jess Phillips? Where is Shabana Mahmood? Where is our government? Where is the mainstream media?

You know what we are up against. The mainstream media will not touch my work. Institutions I investigate do not volunteer their records. Politicians do not suddenly decide to hold themselves to account.

And yet, despite every attempt to stop us, we forced the national inquiry. We did that because enough ordinary people refused to go away.

But getting the inquiry was never the end of this campaign. In many ways it was only the beginning. Now we have to watch where it goes, what it investigates, which places it avoids, which witnesses it calls, which records it obtains and whether the same institutions that failed these children are allowed to control the story again.

Nobody else is going to do that work for us. And I cannot do it indefinitely working on my own. That is why I keep talking about 50,000 committed subscribers.

It is not a vanity number. I did not pluck it out of the air. Fifty thousand people with me means that when we uncover something important, it does not depend on a newspaper editor, a television producer or an algorithm deciding whether you are allowed to see it.

It gives us reach they cannot easily shut down.

But there is another reason. I need to build a proper backroom operation around this work. At the moment I am investigating, researching, writing, publishing, producing the videos, running the newsletter, dealing with the technology and then starting again. It is unsustainable.

I need people behind me who can take care of the technical and production work so that I can spend my time doing the thing I do best. That is why we have been pushing so hard for new paid subscribers.

You already get everything I publish for free. There are no paywalls to access any of my work. But if you read my work and want it to continue, I need your help. If you can afford the £3 a month or £30 for the year, please become a paid subscriber.

We forced the inquiry. Now we need the numbers to make sure they cannot control what happens next. Unfortunately, we are reaching the end of the road where I can continue working this way.

The paid subscriptions have stalled. The audience is growing, but the number of people actually standing behind the work is not growing with it. Over a million people engaged with my content on social media this week. Nearly 300,000 people have read at least one of my articles here. Only a small fraction followed up with a subscription to my newsletter. Forget 50,000 subscribers, we cannot even get half way despite the please. This is becoming impossible to sustain.

Have a look around you. No one else in this country is doing the work that I do, never mind for nearly a decade. All I’m asking in return is £3 a month to add weight to our ability to take on the government. Is that too much to ask?

Raja Miah MBE