THE RAPE GANG FILES: BIRMINGHAM
THE RAPE GANG FILES
For decades, children were raped and trafficked while the people paid to protect them knew what was happening. Evidence was buried, victims were abandoned, perpetrators escaped justice and those responsible for the failures went on to enjoy careers, promotions and positions of power.
The Rape Gang Files exposes the cover-up, town by town and city by city.
We examine who knew, who concealed the evidence, why they did it, who benefited and who fought to keep the truth hidden. We document how the cover-up was challenged, what the national statutory inquiry must expose and what the public can do to force accountability.
This is not just about the men who raped the children. It is about the people who protected them, the institutions that escaped accountability and the political interests that put themselves before the victims.
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.
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Birmingham Council Took the Rapists Out of Its Own Report. Now It Wants to Decide What the Inquiry Reads.
WHAT HAPPENED?
For more than thirty-five years, Birmingham City Council had little White girls in its care who were being raped and trafficked by networks of Pakistani men. It knew what was taking place and failed to protect them. Emboldened, the men involved, and others watching on, recognising they were protected, grew their operation and to target other children. Schools, youth clubs, street corners, nowhere remained safe. By the time we forced the national inquiry, Birmingham had become a hub for the rape gangs with children from towns and cities across the United Kingdom trafficked through the city.
No one knows how many men are involved. West Midlands Police profiles identified the offenders as predominantly Pakistani and Muslim. In 2015 a confidential police profile counted more than 700 potential victims across the West Midlands in just three months. The force had kept that number to itself. As with the men, no one knows how many children were gang raped and trafficked in the city.
This is not a historical issue. As recently as 30 September 2026, the council's scrutiny report showed police investigating 98 cases of children being sexually exploited in Birmingham. Six grooming gangs had been identified operating in the city, with 143 children at risk or already being exploited. That report also recorded that in May 2026 two Birmingham private hire drivers lost their licences after police passed on information about potential sexual offences against children. Private hire drivers are the trade Dr Jill Jesson found in the council's case notes in 1990, and on her account the council took them out of her report.
WHO KNEW?
Birmingham City Council knew in 1990, when it commissioned Jesson, a researcher at Aston University, to research girls in its care, aged thirteen to seventeen, who were being picked up by men and passed around. The council's own social workers had already written Asian private hire drivers into the girls' case notes, and Jesson found them there.
West Midlands Police knew by 2010, when its profiles found most suspects were Asian, a large proportion of them of Pakistani heritage. In 2013 the Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board reported that the city was failing to protect children from sexual exploitation and called the absence of prosecutions startling.
WHO COVERED IT UP?
Jesson says the council's steering group, the officials overseeing her research, ordered her to take the link to the drivers out and that copies of her report were to be destroyed. When part of it reached the social services committee in December 1995, councillors were given the chance to find out who had buried it. They voted not to look. In 2015 the council gave its own strategic director for people, Peter Hay, the job of examining what had happened to Jesson's report. He declared "I am assured that there was no cover-up" and named nobody. Those were decisions, taken by officials and councillors, to stop anyone finding out.
West Midlands Police issued no public warning, and its profiles only came out in 2015. The police and the council turned on the girls instead, locking the victims in secure accommodation while the men raping them stayed free. Now a familiar story, they responded by treating thirteen-year-old girls who kept going missing with groups of men old enough to be their grandfathers as making a lifestyle choice.
WHY WAS IT COVERED UP?
The council has never given its reason. Jesson says she was told to remove the drivers, and the councillors who voted down the enquiry in 1995 have never explained why. The police wrote theirs down. Their profiles warned that the "predominant offender profile of Pakistani Muslim males" had "the potential to cause significant community tensions."
The council's silence in 1991 and the police's in 2010 came from the same fear. Politicians who depended on communal bloc votes treated every question about the men as an attack on their voters, and the police and the council that answered to those politicians looked away. The same decisions were made in Rotherham, in Oldham and in town after town where children were sold for votes.
WHO BENEFITED FROM THE COVER-UP?
The officials in charge went to the top of British public life. Roger Taylor, chief executive from 1988 to 1994, later ran other councils. Yve Buckland, assistant director of social services, became deputy chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the body that oversaw complaints against the police. Sir Michael Lyons was chief executive when councillors voted not to look in 1995. He was knighted in 2000, and in 2007 the Labour government made him chairman of the BBC Trust.
Not one of them has been questioned under oath about what they knew or what they decided. No body independent of the council has ever examined what it did with Jesson's report, and the men in its case notes walked free.
WHO RESISTED EXPOSURE?
Roger Harmer became leader of Birmingham City Council in June 2026 although his Liberal Democrats came sixth, with 12 of the council's 101 seats. He governs through a minority coalition with the Greens, the Birmingham Independents and Better Birmingham, a bloc of seven independent Muslim councillors whose leader, Harris Khaliq, sits in his cabinet.
Reform UK, the largest party on the council, asked Harmer to request that the national inquiry investigate Birmingham. He refused.
Ayoub Khan, the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, left Harmer's Liberal Democrats in 2024 and won his seat backed by The Muslim Vote, a campaign set up to mobilise Muslim voters against Labour over Gaza. On 29 September 2026 Khan wrote to the national inquiry before it had heard a single witness, telling it the focus should be on victims "rather than the identities of perpetrators."
The national inquiry's terms of reference require it to examine the identities of the perpetrators. Just as with the national inquiry itself, this was a requirement that we had forced.
HOW WAS THE TRUTH FORCED INTO THE OPEN?
We did not wait for Birmingham's politicians. In March 2026 we published the record Birmingham City Council had buried for thirty-five years, from the Jesson report and the 1995 vote to the police profiles. On 24 June 2026 Baroness Anne Longfield, chair of the national statutory inquiry, named her first areas and left Birmingham off.
On 29 June a cross-party letter asking for Birmingham to be investigated went to Longfield, signed by Conservative group leader Robert Alden, Sir Andrew Mitchell MP and Jess Phillips MP. It made no newspaper headline, and even GB News and TalkTV, the channels that have covered the rape gangs more than any others, did not report it. Harmer did not sign it. We published it and we did not let Birmingham go until Longfield named the city on 30 September 2026, against the wishes of its own council leader.
WILL THE NATIONAL INQUIRY EXPOSE THE COVER-UP OR ALLOW IT TO CONTINUE?
On 1 October 2026 Harmer welcomed the inquiry he had refused to request and announced that his council would republish its 1991 report "and any other historic reports that can be located." My position is clear, he wants the council to publish before Longfield compels anything, so that the version the public sees is the one the council chose, and whatever it says it cannot find is lost rather than destroyed.
The council that buried the evidence would then have written the inventory of its files before the inquiry asked a question, and Harmer would walk into that inquiry as the leader who opened them.
The day before, his council's report had given councillors the age and sex of the offenders in its 98 open cases and left out their ethnicity, which Baroness Casey's audit said must be recorded in every case.
The inquiry's standing notice to preserve documents, in force since April 2026, makes it a criminal offence for the council to destroy, conceal or alter them. The notice stops the council destroying the files. It does not make the council hand them over. Longfield must use her powers under the Inquiries Act to compel the council, West Midlands Police and Birmingham Children's Trust to produce every original file, including the full Jesson report, the steering group's names and the minutes of the 1995 vote, before the council republishes a page. She must put Taylor, Buckland, Lyons and Hay under oath and examine the ethnicity, religion and culture of the men, as her terms of reference require.
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.
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 CAN YOU DO?
Every councillor and every MP in Birmingham must be made to answer for what their institutions knew, what they concealed and what they are prepared to do to expose it. The people of Birmingham must demand the whole of it. They must demand the original evidence, the names of the officials who decided to bury it and the reasons children in the council’s care were abandoned to the men. They must demand to know who in politics leaned on whom, what was done to the girls who asked for help, and proof that the 98 cases open in the city are being investigated to the men and not stopped at the girls. Harmer welcoming the inquiry cost him nothing and handed over nothing. Birmingham’s politicians must be judged on whether they help the inquiry establish who protected the perpetrators and why.
Politicians did not keep this cover-up on their own, and the people who can break it are not all in politics. Survivors, social workers, former council officers and police officers hold what the files do not, and every one of them must have a way to bring it to the inquiry directly, without going through the council or the force that failed them. Each refusal to hand over a document, each attempt to narrow what the inquiry can examine and each witness who will not answer must be put on the public record, because that is what the council relied on in 1991 and 1995.
We forced this inquiry and we forced Birmingham onto it, and we will not stop at the files. Join us, because nobody in authority will finish this on their own. Some of the girls in Jesson’s files were thirteen when, on her account, the men raping them were taken out of the council’s report. They are now in their late forties and fifties having never answered for what they did. The children in the 98 cases open in Birmingham today are owed more than that silence. So are the girls, that for 4 decades at least, were gang raped and trafficked from and through Birmingham. They are owed the names of the men who raped them and of the officials who protected those men.
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.
Blacklisted by the mainstream media, only your support makes it possible for me to keep exposing the truth those in power want buried.
They sold children for votes and sacrificed entire towns and cities at their altar of multiculturalism. I help you make sense of it. And I help you fight back.
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Raja Miah MBE