THE GIRLS WERE RAPED. THE REPORT WAS BURIED. JESS PHILLIPS WAS BIRMINGHAM'S VICTIMS' CHAMPION.
Girls were raped, beaten and sold for sex while in Birmingham City Council's care. Its own researcher documented the rapes and the council's concern about bad publicity. In 2012 the council made Jess Phillips its first Victims' Champion. What did she do when the allegations resurfaced while she held that role?
Dr Jill Jesson investigated the sexual exploitation of twenty girls in the care of Birmingham City Council in 1991. One was just thirteen years old. Ten others were fourteen or fifteen.
These were children the council had a legal duty to protect. Men were raping them and selling them for sex.
From a sample of just twenty girls, Jesson recorded allegations of rape, physical assaults, cigarette burns and a girl being thrown from a moving car. Six girls came back to care with sexually transmitted diseases. Four pregnancies were confirmed.
Several girls had taken overdoses. Others had injured themselves.
Birmingham Social Services, Jesson found, had no systematic response when a child in its care said she had been raped. Section 5.7 of her report records its concern about protecting itself from bad publicity.
THE COUNCIL CUT THE MEN OUT OF THE REPORT AND THEN VOTED NOT TO LOOK
Jesson's surviving report links girls in care to private-hire drivers and to men suspected of pimping them, without saying who those men were. In November 2014 Jesson said publicly that the men were Asian, and that she had been ordered to strip out references to their ethnicity and to the private-hire trade. Most of the girls were white.
She said the council ordered the copies of her report destroyed. She said it cancelled the meeting planned to discuss her findings.
In December 1995 the Director of Social Services, Richard Evans, had put a paper to councillors defending the decision not to circulate Jesson's findings. With twenty girls in his department's care on Jesson's record, he told councillors there was no significant quantitative problem. He warned against "voyeuristic intrusion". He called claims that the report had been buried "deliberately manufactured".
Councillors then voted against an inquiry by twelve votes to five. This vote made the cover-up the council's decision. Jesson had documented the rapes and the overdoses. Evans had defended keeping her findings back. The councillors chose not to find out who was responsible.
BIRMINGHAM MADE JESS PHILLIPS ITS FIRST VICTIMS' CHAMPION
Jess Phillips was elected as a Labour councillor for Longbridge in May 2012. In June 2012 the council appointed her its first Victims' Champion. The role was meant to give victims of crime a voice and to lobby the police and criminal justice bodies on their behalf. She also sat on the West Midlands Police and Crime Panel.
She held that role in November 2014, when Jesson publicly accused the council of burying her report, stripping out the men's ethnicity and ordering the copies destroyed. She still held it in April 2015, when the council investigated itself.
Peter Hay, the council's Strategic Director for People, investigated the claim that the report had been buried and reported to the education and vulnerable children scrutiny committee. He admitted a huge opportunity to protect children in care had been missed. Then he told councillors he was assured there had been no cover-up, and that social services had been robust in following up the girls' psychological needs. These were girls who had taken overdoses in the council's care.
Hay's report was the council clearing itself a second time, to its own elected members. Phillips was one of those members. The council had given her the job of standing up for victims.
Weeks later, in May 2015, she left for Westminster as MP for Birmingham Yardley. I cannot find any action Phillips took on the Jesson Report while she was on the council.
- Did she ask for the original report?
- Did she challenge Hay's assurance?
- Did she try to find out who ordered the copies destroyed?
- Did she ask whether the men who raped those girls ever faced justice?
On 28 April 2026 she told the Home Affairs Committee that as a Birmingham councillor she made every person who worked at the council routinely ask people whether they had been victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence. I have found no comparable account of what she did when her own council was accused of burying a report into the rape of girls in its care.
The council gave her the job of standing up for victims. Phillips must be called to testify before the national inquiry on what she did with that job when the Jesson Report resurfaced.
AS MINISTER SHE REFUSED OLDHAM AND CALLED HER OWN VIEW ON BIRMINGHAM ACADEMIC
In July 2024 Phillips became the Government's Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls. In October 2024 she refused Oldham Council's request for a government-led inquiry into the rape gangs. In January 2025, after her refusal outraged millions across the world, she offered five local reviews instead, none with the power to compel evidence. The Government held that line until Baroness Casey's audit forced a national statutory inquiry in June 2025.
In September 2025 Phillips told the Commons that girls from Telford had been exploited in Birmingham, where she lives. In the same answer she said she could not direct where the inquiry went.
On 28 April 2026, still the minister, she told the Home Affairs Committee the inquiry should look into Bradford and Birmingham. She said her own work in the field told her there were problems in both. She then said that what she personally thought was "entirely academic", because the inquiry was independent and would choose its own areas.
She was the minister who oversaw the appointment of its chair and its terms of reference. A sitting safeguarding minister who calls her own view academic is choosing not to use the powers of her office.
At the same hearing she was asked about records being destroyed. She said that when something obvious is missing that should be there, it "tells a story", and that where records had been destroyed for malign reasons she expected the inquiry to look into it. Jesson said the council Phillips later served on ordered copies of her report destroyed. On Phillips's own words, the inquiry must find out why.
Phillips eventually resigned from her ministerial position in May 2026. Her resignation letter did not mention the inquiry.
On 29 June 2026, eight weeks after telling the Home Affairs Committee her view was "entirely academic", she signed a letter with Sir Andrew Mitchell and Councillor Robert Alden asking Baroness Longfield to include Birmingham. The inquiry was no less independent in June than it had been in April. She was no longer the minister.
I believe she called her view academic while she held the power to act on it, and wrote to the chair only once she had lost that power. The letter did not mention the Jesson Report, the 1995 vote or a cover-up.
When Birmingham was added on 30 September 2026, she suggested the true number of crimes in the city could be much higher. She spoke about the city's figures without naming the report her own council buried or how many children could have been saved if the council had not repeatedly covered up what was taking place.
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.
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BIRMINGHAM HAS LEFT THE MEN OUT A SECOND TIME
On 30 September 2026 Birmingham councillors received another account of child sexual exploitation in their city. There were 143 children identified as experiencing, or at risk of, sexual exploitation. Fifty-two per cent had repeatedly gone missing.
Police were running 98 live child sexual exploitation investigations. They knew of six grooming gangs operating in the city. Two private-hire drivers had also had their licences recently revoked after police intelligence about potential sexual offences against children.
The figures named the private-hire trade Jesson says she was made to cut from her report. They gave no breakdown of suspects by ethnicity or nationality.
Now named in the national inquiry, the council has republished what it calls the Jesson Report. It is the version placed before councillors in 1995, with Evans's paper on the front warning them against voyeuristic intrusion. The council did not publish the original report Jesson says she wrote before the men's ethnicity was removed.
LONGFIELD MUST COMPEL THE RECORD BIRMINGHAM KEPT FROM ITS OWN VICTIMS
The national statutory inquiry chaired by Baroness Anne Longfield has the power the council's internal reviews did not. It can compel documents and witnesses.
Longfield must obtain the original Jesson Report and every surviving draft. She must establish who ordered the men's ethnicity removed, who ordered the copies destroyed and who cancelled the meeting.
Evans's paper and the councillors who voted in 1995 must be examined, along with Hay's 2015 clearance and the councillors it was put to. Jess Phillips must give evidence on what Birmingham's first Victims' Champion did with the Jesson Report, and on what she said about Birmingham to the inquiry while she was the minister responsible for it.
The inquiry must establish who the men were who raped and sold girls in Birmingham's care, what was done about each of them, and what became of the twenty girls Jesson identified. One of them was thirteen.
Birmingham's Social Services protected its reputation while these girls were being raped. The inquiry must find out how many of the men who raped and sold them ever faced a court. It must also identify the politicians and public officials that protected them. Anything less than this is a cover up.
Raja Miah MBE
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.
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