FOURTY YEARS OF LIES, DENIALS AND BETRAYAL
ETHNICITY ERASED. EVIDENCE ORDERED DESTROYED. INQUIRIES VOTED DOWN. WHY BIRMINGHAM MUST ANSWER.
Birmingham City Council commissioned a report into the sexual exploitation of girls in its care. The researcher found twenty girls in the council's own files, and a pattern of girls being driven to groups of men and raped, with private hire drivers recorded in the social workers' notes. The council ordered the link to the drivers' ethnicity erased and the copies of the report destroyed.
The Jesson Report was completed in October 1991, it records that the council had known of concerns about these girls since 1985. It has never been published in full. In October 2026 the council promised to republish it after the national statutory inquiry into the rape gangs had announced Birmingham as an area for investigation.
BIRMINGHAM KNEW BEFORE IT COMMISSIONED THE REPORT
The report records that a council working party identified concerns about girls in its care in 1985. The council held those concerns six years before it destroyed the report that confirmed them.
Birmingham was a Labour council, led by Sir Richard Knowles from 1984 to 1993. It waited five years after that working party before it commissioned Dr Jill Jesson of Aston University to carry out a government-funded study into what the council called the prostitution of girls in its care.
Jesson has said why she was hired. "The city council commissioned me to carry out the piece of research because they knew there was a problem. I was employed to ascertain the scale of the problem. They wanted to quantify it so social services could manage it."
While children were being raped in its homes, the council's response was to commission a count of them so that it could manage the situation.
THE COUNCIL'S OWN FILES SHOWED GIRLS IN ITS CARE BEING PASSED TO GROUPS OF MEN
Over six months Jesson worked through the paper case files of three social services divisions covering 32 children's homes. "I found 20 girls' names, next to which either the word 'prostitution' or some concern about their sexual behaviour had been written." The girls were aged 13 to 18 and every one of them was in the council's care. Sixteen were white, three were of mixed race and one was recorded as Sikh or Hindu. She interviewed five of them, along with police officers, social workers and the officers in charge of the homes.
What she found was not prostitution. "It was 'You're my girl and I love you and you do as I ask'. The girls would go somewhere with a man in a car and there would be several men there, men who wanted to have sex." She described what the council's own staff did about it. "Their job was to find the girls, bring them back to the homes, but then the staff running the homes would just let them walk out again. The homes and social workers knew the girls were coming back with new trainers and new coats, and the girls would just say their boyfriend had got them for them."
The staff in the homes, the social workers and the police all saw the girls going out to the men and coming back. The council's files recorded it.
The private hire drivers were in the council's files before Jesson opened them. "It was written in the social services' notes of the girls that the girls had told about taxi drivers being one of the features of what was happening to them." The girls who told their social workers about the drivers were the same girls the police were cautioning for prostitution.
The report recorded rape allegations, beatings, cigarette burns, sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancies and a girl thrown from a moving car. Social services had no set response when a girl in its care reported being raped. I
ts record keeping was so poor that Jesson could not establish how many more girls there were beyond the twenty. "This was just a six-month snapshot of what was happening at the time."
Peter Hay, the council's strategic director for people, put the figures on the record of the council's scrutiny committee in April 2015. Six of the girls came back into care with sexually transmitted diseases and four became pregnant. Three were physically abused, one of them burned and one thrown out of a moving car. In the same paper Hay said social services had been "robust" in following up the girls' psychological needs.
THE COUNCIL ORDERED THE ETHNICITY OUT AND THE COPIES DESTROYED
Jesson says that when she presented her findings, the council's research steering group told her to take out that the drivers were Asian. "There was a link between the sexual abuse of the girls and private hire drivers in the city. Most of the girls were white. I was asked to take this link out, to erase it." One member of the steering group told her she did not have enough evidence of what was happening elsewhere in the city, so her methodology could have been flawed.
The version of the report that survived refers to taxi drivers, so the council let the drivers stay in it as long as nobody could read that they were Asian men and the girls were white.
Then the report went to senior managers. The minutes of that meeting record that they were asked to destroy their copies. The seminar at which social services was supposed to decide what to do for these girls was cancelled. "The report was shelved, buried, it was never made public. I was shocked to be told that copies of the report were to be destroyed and that nothing further was to be said."
An order to destroy copies of a report is given by a named officer and minuted. It was given in 1991 under the Labour administration of Sir Richard Knowles, with Roger Taylor as the council's chief executive. The report names the members of the research steering group. Not one of them has ever been asked in public who told Jesson to erase the ethnicity of the men, nor has any of them volunteered it.
There is no doubt in my mind that the council ordered those copies destroyed so that nobody would read that Asian taxi drivers were taking little white girls from its homes to be raped.
Unfortunately, we are reaching the end of the road where I can continue working this way.
The paid subscriptions have stalled. Worse, tens of thousands of people are now reading these articles without even joining the free mailing list. The audience is growing, but the number of people actually standing behind the work is not growing with it.
This is becoming impossible to sustain.
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 all of that, 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. With fifty thousand people with me means 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.
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We forced the inquiry. Now we need the numbers to make sure they cannot control what happens next.
Raja Miah MBE
COUNCILLORS REFUSED TO ASK WHAT HAPPENED IN 1995
The Labour council of 1995 was led by Theresa Stewart, with Sir Michael Lyons as chief executive. On 13 December 1995 the report came before the Social Services Committee. The report went to the committee without its appendices, and in the version the steering group had altered, not the one Jesson wrote. Councillor Sue Anderson told the committee that it revealed nothing that was not already common knowledge, and the Chair, Councillor Eve Brook, told it that in quantitative terms prostitution was not a major issue for the council.
The social services director, Richard Evans, told the committee there had been no cover-up and that the recommendations had been acted on. Evans admitted in 1995 that he had not seen the report, when he claimed there had been no cover-up.
At the same meeting Councillor Graham Green moved that the Director be instructed to hold a full enquiry into how many girls in the council’s care were involved and what was being done to protect them. The committee voted it down, twelve to five.
The council claimed in 2014 that the report had been made available in full in 1995. The councillors who voted against the enquiry are named in the minutes of that meeting. Nobody has yet made Birmingham put those names on the public record in the context of this scandal.
Sir Michael Lyons went on to chair the BBC Trust from 2007 to 2011. In October 2012, with the BBC facing questions over Jimmy Savile and the Newsnight investigation it had dropped, he told Sky News, "There is no question of things being covered up here, I'm sure of that." In the same interview he admitted he did not know the details of what Newsnight had dropped.
Lyons was chief executive of Birmingham when its councillors voted not to ask what had happened to a report about girls in the council's homes being raped. Nobody has put to him what he knew about that report and when he knew it, which is a question the inquiry can require him to answer.
THE COUNCIL CLEARED ITSELF IN 2015
When Jesson spoke publicly for the first time in November 2014, to Jeanette Oldham of the Birmingham Mail, the council investigated itself. Under the Labour leadership of Sir Albert Bore, with Mark Rogers as chief executive, Peter Hay was put in charge of it. Hay had already told the Mail in November 2014 that the department decided in 1991 not to publish the report for reasons that were not clear. In April 2015 he told the scrutiny committee he was assured there had been no cover-up, and that a huge opportunity to protect children in care had been missed.
Hay could not say why the report was buried, but he was assured it had not been covered up. If the reasons are not clear, what was he assured of, and by whom? A council that cannot explain why it destroyed a report into the rape of children in its care has no standing to clear itself.
THE INQUIRY FORCED THE COUNCIL'S HAND
The council has gone back to the Jesson Report because the inquiry can take it. We spent March 2026 publishing the record Birmingham had buried for thirty-five years including the report, the steering group's instruction, the destroyed copies, the 1995 vote and the names of the men who ran the council when each decision was taken.
When Baroness Anne Longfield announced the first areas for local investigation on 24 June 2026, Birmingham was not among them. The council's leader, Roger Harmer, declined to ask for it to be. Harmer is a Liberal Democrat who has run the council since June 2026 at the head of a coalition with the Greens and independents, formed after Labour lost control in the May elections.
On 30 September 2026 the inquiry confirmed it would investigate Birmingham without his request. Unlike Hay's 2015 review, it can compel documents and witnesses. From that day the council could no longer decide for itself which of its files the public would see.
The same day, the council's Education, Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny Committee was told how many children in the city were being sexually exploited. There were 98 live child sexual exploitation investigations, six of them involving groups of men (grooming gangs), with 143 children at risk of or experiencing exploitation at the end of July. Police had recorded 99 child sexual exploitation crimes in the first six months of 2026. In May two private hire drivers had their licences revoked immediately after West Midlands Police passed on intelligence about potential sexual offences against children. Private hire drivers were back in front of the council, thirty-five years after Jesson was told to take out who the drivers were.
The committee papers gave the ages and sex of suspects and left out their ethnicity and nationality. Opposition councillors challenged the omission, citing the council's 2014 scrutiny report, We Need to Get It Right, and Baroness Casey's 2025 national audit, which told every authority in the country to record perpetrator ethnicity.
It also emerged that West Midlands Police had only begun routinely recording the ethnicity of child sexual exploitation offenders in the previous twelve months. The ethnicity of the men, which the steering group erased in 1991, was not being routinely recorded by Birmingham's police force until 2025, and on the day the inquiry arrived the council was not publishing it either.
The next day Harmer acknowledged that children had been let down by historic safeguarding failures and said the council would confront the question of perpetrator ethnicity. He promised to republish the Jesson Report "and any other historic reports that can be located". "This is not about protecting institutions or reputations; it is about protecting children," he said. The coalition backed the statement, as did Reform's Jex Parkin, the Conservatives' Robert Alden and the leaders of the Birmingham Independent Workers and Labour groups.
Labour ran Birmingham when the report was shelved, when the enquiry was voted down and when Hay cleared the council. I do not accept that promise from the council that buried the report, least of all with the party that did the burying standing behind it.
The National Inquiry is entering the phase that will decide not just where it goes, but what it is prepared to confront once it gets there.
Birmingham proves why that matters.
We fought to get the city onto the list. Now, before the first witnesses have even been heard, a Pakistani politician is already trying to decide which questions should be pushed out of focus.
That is why the pressure cannot stop at getting places named.
Red Wall and the Rabble is now more than 15,000 strong. In the last three months, more than 1,000 people have committed to a paid subscription, and 250,000 people have read one of my investigations so far this year.
We forced Oldham onto the list. We showed the way in Bradford. We campaigned relentlessly in Birmingham and across Wales, and both were named.
None of it was handed to us.
And now the next fight begins. Making sure the Inquiry actually asks the questions politicians and institutions spent decades avoiding.
No political party funds this work. No institution stands behind me. Everything I publish remains free because the evidence needs to reach as many people as possible.
The people who pay are the people who give me the independence to keep investigating, keep applying pressure and keep forcing these questions into the open.
We set out to reach 2,000 paid subscribers. We still need another 1,000 more.
If you want this Inquiry to go where the evidence leads, regardless of who it embarrasses, who it exposes or which political interests it threatens, become one of the next 1,000.
WHAT LONGFIELD MUST TAKE FROM BIRMINGHAM
Birmingham City Council must publish the whole Jesson Report, both parts, as Jesson wrote it before the ethnicity of the men was taken out. Harmer has offered what the council can locate. The council ordered the copies destroyed, so it knows what it has.
It must publish the 1985 working party papers, the names of the steering group and which of them told Jesson to erase the ethnicity of the men, the minutes that ordered the copies destroyed and who gave that order, the December 1995 papers with the names of the councillors who voted against an enquiry, and the file behind Hay's 2015 paper with the name of whoever assured him there was no cover-up. Where a document cannot be found, the council must say when it was lost and who was responsible for it.
West Midlands Police must publish the ethnicity of the suspects in the 98 live investigations and the six group cases. It must say what it held on private hire drivers in Birmingham between Jesson's report and the two licences revoked in May 2026.
Baroness Longfield must take those documents herself. She must call Sir Michael Lyons, Peter Hay, Roger Taylor and Richard Evans to give evidence on what they knew and what they did, and she must take evidence from every surviving member of the steering group and every councillor who voted on 13 December 1995. She must establish whether any of the men in the council's case notes was ever investigated, whether any was prosecuted, and who decided they would not be.
The twenty girls in Jesson's report are grown women. Six went back into care with sexually transmitted diseases, four were pregnant, one was burned and one was thrown from a moving car. The council had their names and their files in 1990 and has had those facts on its own record since 2015. Longfield must find every one of them who is alive and take her evidence directly, not through the council that buried it. Each of them must be told what the council did with what she said, whether the men who took her were ever investigated, and who decided they would not be.
My name is Raja Miah MBE. For eight years I have exposed how politicians, police and public bodies failed working class White girls who were systematically raped by Pakistani grooming gangs. Together, with the support of the people of Oldham, we forced the Government to concede a National Statutory Inquiry after years of resistance.
Children gang raped, communities betrayed, politicians and police officers involved protected, and you expected to shake your head and carry on as if nothing more can be done because lessons have been learned.
For eight years, I have refused. The police repeatedly dawn raided my home and falsified evidence to try and silence me. The newspapers smeared me. And Pakistani gangsters, under the protection of Labour politicians, followed me home. Islamists openly incited my murder.
Blacklisted by the mainstream media, only your support makes it possible for me to keep exposing the truth those in power want buried.
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Raja Miah MBE