Bradford's Rape Gang Reckoning

Reform and the Conservatives have the majority, the mandate and the motion. Now comes the first test of whether any of it was real.

Bradford's local election result on 8 May 2026 produced something that has not existed in this city before. A Reform and Conservative council majority. Twenty-nine Reform seats. Eighteen Conservative seats. Labour reduced to fifteen.

That majority sits in the city where organised child sexual exploitation has been documented since 1955. Where Ann Cryer was handed sixty-five names in 2002 and Bradford Council told her she was wrong. Where a Channel 4 documentary was shelved in 2004 because broadcasters feared the consequences of the truth. Where Fiona Goddard stood in the council chamber in January 2026, presented 5,000 signatures, and was given a prepared non-answer by a leader who has since lost her seat.

Reform and the Conservatives have both spoken at length about grooming gang accountability. That position won them votes. It won them this majority. Bradford's communities did not deliver this result so that the familiar evasions continue under new management.

The first test of whether those words meant anything is simple. At the first full council meeting, this motion must be tabled. Bradford must be formally referred to the National Rape Gang Inquiry. The mandate for it exists. The documentation for it exists. The only question now is whether the political will does.

NOTICE OF MOTION

Bradford Metropolitan District Council

Motion: Referral to the National Rape Gang Inquiry and Investigation of the Conduct of Susan Hinchcliffe, Former Leader of Bradford Council

Proposed by: [Name] Seconded by: [Name]

This Council notes:

1. That Bradford Metropolitan District Council was under the control of a Labour administration led by Councillor Susan Hinchcliffe from May 2016 until her removal from office by the electorate on 8 May 2026. That is almost a decade of uninterrupted leadership authority.
2. That the organised sexual exploitation of children in Bradford is not a recent discovery. The documented record runs from 1955 to the present day. In 1955, four Bradford-based Pakistani men appeared at Bradford City Court charged with sexual offences against a fifteen-year-old girl. Cases in Keighley, Halifax, Nelson and Oldham between 1959 and 1966 recorded the same patterns. A 1960 Nelson case documented the movement of girls between Nelson and Bradford, establishing that organised cross-location networks existed at that date.
3. That in 2002, seven mothers attended the constituency office of Ann Cryer, then Labour MP for Keighley, and handed her a list of sixty-five named men they believed were abusing their daughters. They had already taken this to West Yorkshire Police and to Bradford's social services. They had been ignored. Ann Cryer went public. Bradford Council disputed her concerns. West Yorkshire Police declined to act. Members of her own party called her a racist.
4. That in 2004, a Channel 4 documentary examining the grooming of girls in Bradford by Asian men was postponed. The reason given was fear of race riots.
5. That a dossier produced by Robbie Moore MP identified at least 7,975 children in Bradford as having been at risk of sexual exploitation between 1996 and 2025.
6. That by the time Councillor Susan Hinchcliffe assumed the leadership of Bradford Council in May 2016, the documented record of organised child sexual exploitation in Bradford stretched back more than sixty years. The political record of institutional failure stretched back more than a decade. She inherited both in full.
7. That the National Rape Gang Inquiry has not confirmed Bradford as a city under active investigation.
8. That Councillor Hinchcliffe, as council leader, had the authority and the obligation to formally request Bradford's inclusion in the Inquiry. She did not use it.
9. That on 21 January 2026, Fiona Goddard, a survivor of child sexual exploitation in Bradford who was first abused at the age of fourteen while living in a council-area children's home, presented a petition to the full council signed by over 5,000 people. That petition called on Bradford Council to formally volunteer itself for a targeted grooming gangs inquiry as part of the National Inquiry.
10. That Councillor Hinchcliffe's response was to state that Bradford had written to the Home Secretary expressing willingness to play its full part in the Inquiry.
11. That Miss Goddard addressed this response directly from the floor of the chamber. She told the council that willingness to participate is not the same as asking to be included, and she instructed the leadership not to repeat that formulation to her again.
12. That Councillor Hinchcliffe repeated it anyway. The petition was received. No formal request for Bradford's inclusion was made.
13. That the Bradford District Safeguarding Children Partnership, operating under the institutional framework of this council, had previously stated that a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Bradford was unlikely to provide any new learning. This council never formally repudiated that position.
14. That Councillor Hinchcliffe was the senior elected official in Bradford throughout the period when this council inherited a sixty-year documented failure, was presented with a 5,000-name petition by a named survivor, was told to her face that her response was inadequate, and chose to give that same response again.
15. That on 8 May 2026 the electorate of Bradford removed Labour from control of this council. Labour lost twenty-seven seats in a single night. Councillor Hinchcliffe lost her own seat. The ward she had represented returned three Reform councillors in her place. That result is a public verdict and must now be treated as one.

This Council believes:

1. That the victims of child sexual exploitation in Bradford have not received the institutional acknowledgement they are owed.
2. That Bradford's exclusion from the Inquiry's active investigation list did not happen by accident. It happened because those with the power to demand inclusion chose procedural language over action. Councillor Hinchcliffe held that power for almost a decade. She received it having already inherited more than sixty years of documented failure.
3. That what happened on 21 January 2026 was not an administrative oversight. A survivor came to this chamber and told its leader, in explicit terms, that she was hiding behind words. The leader's response was to continue hiding behind them.
4. That the suppression of the Channel 4 documentary in 2004, the dismissal of Ann Cryer in 2002, the Bradford District Safeguarding Children Partnership's claim that an inquiry would provide no new learning, and Councillor Hinchcliffe's response to Fiona Goddard in January 2026 are not separate failures. They are the same failure, repeated across seven decades, by institutions that placed their own comfort above the safety of children.
5. That the new composition of this council carries a direct mandate from Bradford's communities to act where Councillor Hinchcliffe's administration refused to act. That mandate is not optional.

This Council resolves:

1. To write formally to the National Rape Gang Inquiry requesting that Bradford Metropolitan District be confirmed as a city under active investigation, and to publish that letter in full without delay.
2. To commission an independent review of all council decisions, votes, minutes, and recorded discussions during the period of Councillor Hinchcliffe's leadership in which matters relating to child sexual exploitation, grooming gang accountability, or requests for government oversight were considered, deferred, or defeated.
3. To place on the public record a full account of every occasion on which Councillor Hinchcliffe's administration was presented with evidence of, or representations about, child sexual exploitation in Bradford, and the response that followed on each occasion. The presentation by Miss Fiona Goddard on 21 January 2026 must be included in that account.
4. To formally repudiate the Bradford District Safeguarding Children Partnership's position that a public inquiry would provide no new learning, and to place that repudiation on the record of this chamber.
5. To refer the findings of the independent review to the relevant authorities, including the Local Government Ombudsman and, where the evidence warrants it, West Yorkshire Police.
6. To invite the National Rape Gang Inquiry to attend Bradford Council and receive evidence directly from this chamber.
7. To establish a Bradford Victims Panel with independent membership, so that survivors of child sexual exploitation in Bradford have a formal and permanent voice in this council's proceedings.

Explanatory Note:

The organised sexual exploitation of children in Bradford has been documented since 1955. Politicians were told about it formally in 2002. A television documentary examining it was suppressed in 2004. A survivor stood in this chamber in January 2026 and told the council leader that her response was not good enough. The council leader gave the same response.

This motion does not ask Bradford Council to begin a conversation. That conversation is seventy years old. It asks this council to do what every previous iteration of this council refused to do: place Bradford's victims at the centre of a formal process and compel the institutions that failed them to account for why.

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.

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