They Want You To Think They Conceded. But The Cover Up Continues.

Part Two: What The Terms Were Designed To Leave Alone

The terms protect the Home Office and the political class. The timeline they have built protects everyone else. These are the three failures that matter most.

The Home Office Has Not Been Touched. It Was Never Meant To Be

The inquiry was announced as a response to institutional failure. The Home Office is the institution most directly responsible for that failure at national level. The terms of reference leave it untouched.

When pressure for a national statutory inquiry became impossible to ignore, the department designed an alternative. Yvette Cooper's department constructed non-statutory local inquiries without compulsion powers, presenting them as accountability while ensuring they could produce no compelled findings. The process collapsed when Baroness Casey's audit in June 2025 made it untenable. The people who designed it have never been asked to explain their actions. They remain in post.

Jess Phillips was safeguarding minister. She refused publicly to commission a national inquiry when she had the power to do so. When the inquiry was eventually forced into existence she was handed responsibility for establishing it. She then proceeded to undermine it. The two candidates she shortlisted to chair the inquiry came from social work and policing, the two institutions most directly implicated in the cover-up. One was even a Labour Party acivist. Their names were leaked, people were outraged at what was being attempted and both were forced to withdraw.

Survivors on the victims liaison panel resigned, accusing Phillips of using condescending and controlling language, of attempting to widen the inquiry's scope beyond grooming gangs to dilute its focus, and of publicly contradicting their accounts when they spoke out.

Four survivors demanded her removal as a condition of rejoining the process. She denied their accounts in the Commons, telling Parliament their allegations were categorically untrue. Evidence subsequently published showed they were telling the truth. The terms of reference announced on Tuesday contain nothing that would force Phillips to explain any of her actions.

Keir Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013. Rochdale prosecutions were being dropped during those years. Rotherham's abuse was at its height. Forces across the country were closing cases involving Pakistani-heritage suspects on racially sensitive grounds, and the CPS under his leadership made decisions about those cases. What he was briefed and what decisions followed have never been examined under compulsion. He announced this inquiry after Casey made refusal impossible. The terms do not ask him to account for what happened on his watch at the CPS.

Ann Cryer raised organised abuse by Pakistani-heritage men in Parliament in the early 2000s. She was ignored. That parliamentary record exists. The Home Office received that signal at the highest level and chose not to act.

Jack Straw named Pakistani men specifically in 2011 and faced a political assault for doing so. Sarah Champion was ostracised by her own party after writing in 2017 that Britain had a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. She was forced to resign from the shadow cabinet within days.

Lucy Allan, MP for Telford, was openly threatened for pursuing the question of organised abuse in her own constituency. The police turned up uninvited, at her home, to threaten her, an MP, of the party in government. Who sent them?

The pattern across two decades is consistent. Every politician who named what was happening faced immediate and coordinated political consequences. None of it falls within the inquiry's current scope. The machinery that silenced those politicians has not been placed under examination. Why?

Theresa May was Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016. The Jay report on Rotherham was published in 2014 on her watch. The pattern was fully documented and nationally known across her tenure. What she was briefed and what decisions followed has never been examined under compulsion. The terms do not require sworn evidence from her.

Sajid Javid commissioned a Home Office report on grooming gang offending in 2018, promising there would be no no-go areas of inquiry and that cultural sensitivities would not get in the way. The report that emerged in December 2020 under Priti Patel was so heavily manipulated that Patel herself expressed dissatisfaction with its conclusions in her own foreword.

The report was only published after a petition signed by over 100,000 people forced it. Instead of forcing the truth out into the open, this falsified evidence in an official Home Office document was used for years to close down scrutiny of the disproportionate representation of Pakistani-heritage men in this form of organised abuse.

Javid has never explained what happened between his 2018 commission and the 2020 findings. Patel has never been compelled to explain why she published a report she knew was inadequate. The current terms do not require either of them to.

The 2020 report itself is a standalone act of state deception. Produced under a Home Secretary, based on data the department controlled, it reached conclusions that have not survived independent scrutiny. The people who built those conclusions and the ministers who deployed them to close down further scrutiny are identifiable. The inquiry has not been asked to look at any of them.

Dame Antonia Romeo testified to parliament in December 2025. Her answers about the destruction of Home Office evidence do not survive scrutiny. That testimony was given in a post-Hillsborough Law environment, under a framework that places an explicit Duty of Candour on public officials, a statutory obligation to be truthful and transparent when accounting to Parliament.

Romeo's answers, measured against that obligation, raise questions that have not been asked in public and have not been placed within this inquiry's scope. She remains in post as the most powerful civil servant in the country. Appointed in to her position by Keir Starmer.

The terms contain nothing that would force the inquiry into her testimony or compel examination of whether a senior civil servant breached her statutory duty to Parliament when accounting for what her department preserved and what it destroyed.

Robbie Moore MP has placed on the public record his concern about the protection of key evidence and the Home Office's role in the process leading up to this inquiry. That concern has produced no response from the department and no amendment to the terms.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse ran for seven years and cost £186 million. It examined institutional child sexual abuse across multiple settings and produced no criminal accountability for the grooming gang cover-up. The question that has never been answered is why.

IICSA had the powers. It had the evidence. It had the means to secure testimony of survivors from Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and Oldham. The towns where Pakistani-heritage networks operated at industrial scale were removed from central examination. No cultural or religious factors driving the offending were analysed. Whistleblower testimony was reportedly suppressed and not published. Fiona Goddard, a Bradford survivor, said publicly that a deliberate decision was made to ignore the towns where grooming had taken place.

The ethnicity question, the same question that has been fought over for years before being partially conceded in Tuesday's terms, was available to IICSA and was not pursued to a finding. Seven years. £186 million. The Home Office oversaw every year of it.

The pattern of managed process that produced IICSA's silence on Pakistani-heritage perpetrator networks is the same pattern that produced the non-statutory local inquiries and will, without sustained pressure, produce the same result from this one.

Throughout the period of abuse the government ran community cohesion programmes and Prevent funding into the towns where Pakistani-heritage networks were operating. Community organisations in those areas received public money. The Casey audit found that organisations in those same communities were reluctant to cooperate with her investigation.

The question that has never been asked in any statutory setting is whether any of that public funding went to organisations that prioritised community reputation over victim safety, discouraged reporting, or provided social cover for perpetrators. The Home Office holds the funding records. The terms of this inquiry do not require it to produce them.

Perpetrators have fled to Pakistan. The extradition gap is real and documented. The United Kingdom has no extradition treaty with Pakistan that functions in practice for these cases. What decisions were made about pursuing those who fled, by whom, and when, has never been forced into public examination. The terms do not ask.

The Home Office built the sham process Casey dismantled. The minister who refused the inquiry worked from within it. The CPS made its decisions about grooming gang prosecutions during the years the department oversaw it. Parliamentary warnings arrived and went unanswered. The report that manipulated ethnicity data was produced on its instructions. Evidence was destroyed on its watch. The extradition gap belongs to it. The terms leave all of it untouched.

The Terms Still Protect Politicians

The only mechanism available for politicians, if they are ever reached at all, is Beaconport. It was designed to review dropped rape cases against perpetrators. Examining the conduct of elected officials was never part of its remit, and nothing in Tuesday's announcement changes that.

Andy Burnham commissioned assurance reviews in Greater Manchester. Those reviews were designed to produce managed findings, conducted by structures that reported back to the very institutions under examination. Burnham has never been compelled to explain the design of those reviews, the findings they produced, or the decisions he made before and after commissioning them. He remains Mayor of Greater Manchester. The terms do not ask for Burnham to be investigated.

Jim McMahon was leader of Oldham Council during the period when the town's institutional failures were being embedded. He later became an MP and a minister. His decisions in Oldham have never been examined under compulsion. The terms do not require it.

Shaun Davies is Labour MP for Telford, elected in 2024 and immediately placed on the Home Affairs Select Committee, the parliamentary body tasked with scrutiny of the grooming gangs inquiry process.

Before entering Parliament, Davies was leader of Telford and Wrekin Council. In 2016 he signed a letter calling on the then prime minister and home secretary to reject calls for an inquiry into child sexual abuse in Telford. Telford never received a statutory inquiry.

He then went to Westminster and was handed a seat on the committee overseeing the process he had obstructed. The Spectator named him in a piece titled "A grooming gang inquiry will expose Labour's guilty men." The terms announced on Tuesday will not compel him to explain a single decision.

Roger Ellis was Chief Executive of Rochdale Council for twelve years. He told the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2012 that he knew nothing about child sexual exploitation in Rochdale until 2010 when charges were brought. His position, stated under parliamentary scrutiny, was that with the information available to him he did not think there was anything he could have done. He left the council after the scandal broke and has never been required to return under statutory compulsion. The terms of this inquiry do not change that.

Simon Danczuk was MP for Rochdale from 2010 to 2017. When the grooming scandal broke in 2012 he named ethnicity and religion as central factors in the abuse. Tony Lloyd, then chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party and at the time campaigning to become Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester, warned him directly not to raise the ethnic and religious background of the perpetrators.

The warning was explicit. Doing so would damage the Labour vote in communities with large Pakistani populations.

Danczuk ignored it. He has said publicly that he wrote to the national inquiry in 2017 stating that Lloyd had warned him off and was concerned about votes. He repeated the allegation on record as recently as October 2025.

Lucy Allan, the Conservative MP who represented Telford, was openly threatened for pursuing the question of what happened in the town. The police attended her home and attempted to intimidate her.

Then there is Jess Phillips. In June 2025, on the parliamentary record, Phillips told the Commons: "I waited 14 years for anyone to do anything." Fourteen years takes her back to 2011, four years before she entered Parliament. She was a safeguarding campaigner who knew what was happening, knew it was being covered up, and has said she spoke to victims week in, week out for decades.

In April 2025 Phillips admitted in the Commons that the cover-up was real. Yet she is on record for refusing to commission a national statutory inquiry and defended local investigations run by the institutions that had covered the abuse up.

A minister who waited fourteen years for anyone to do anything, then spent her time in office doing as little as she could get away with, falls outside the scope of this inquiry. The terms do not ask her to explain that arithmetic.

These are the names already on the public record, a fraction of what exists. Across every town where this happened there are council leaders, police and crime commissioners, MPs, cabinet ministers, and party officials who knew and chose silence. Most have never been named in any public forum, and the ones who have faced scrutiny did so only because journalists and campaigners forced it into the open against sustained resistance.

The inquiry has not been asked to find the others or to map the political class that managed this scandal from above. Institutional failures will be examined. The decisions made by the individuals who engineered those failures sit largely beyond what it has been asked to examine.

A pledge to investigate politicians that carries no statutory force and points toward a criminal process that cannot reach them is a pledge designed to be forgotten once the cameras have moved on.

A Timeline That Cannot Be Met

Robbie Moore MP has done the arithmetic the government hoped nobody would do publicly. The three-month period to establish selection criteria means local investigations cannot begin until well into the inquiry's first year.

Three months to agree selection criteria, then months of investigation per area, with report composition taking a minimum of three months per area on top of that. The Memorandum of Understanding with Beaconport will not be published for six months, meaning the inquiry operates without defined rules for its most important relationship for half of its first year.

Stack all of that inside a three-year window covering multiple towns across England and Wales and the timeline is not ambitious. The scope will be narrowed or the deadline will slip. The rolling reports concession is the most likely casualty. The government built a process it knows cannot be completed. The design is the point.

Oldham is confirmed. Every other town is provisional. Telford never received a statutory inquiry. Birmingham's abuse was documented in the Jill Jesson report in 1991 and has never been the subject of compelled public scrutiny. Bradford has not been confirmed. Rochdale, where convictions produced national headlines but no reckoning with institutional failure above street level, is not confirmed. Rotherham, where 1,400 children were abused and the Jay report named systemic failure, is not confirmed. Huddersfield, Halifax, Newcastle, Derby and Oxford are all unconfirmed.

The inquiry says it will follow the evidence.

The selection criteria will be built on evidence supplied by local institutions, the same bodies that spent years suppressing scrutiny of what happened in their areas. When non-statutory local inquiries were first proposed in January last year, not a single council aside from Oldham volunteered. And that was only because we forced it to.

Bradford Council has spent years defending its record and resisting calls for an inquiry into abuse in areas like Keighley.

A process built on following existing evidence will pass over the towns where evidence was never gathered and settle on the towns where institutions cooperated enough to generate a file. The inquiry has handed its selection mechanism to the people who decided what would and would not be written down.

Every week of process is a week that benefits the institutions with the most to lose. The selection criteria must be published the moment they are agreed and subjected to immediate public scrutiny.

Badenoch Declared Victory. Farage Walked Away. Lowe Has the Evidence.

Three positions emerged from Tuesday's announcement outside government. Badenoch called the terms significantly strengthened. Farage called the inquiry a waste of space. Lowe's private investigation has found child sexual exploitation in 85 local authorities.

The first gave the government cover. The second named the problem without deploying the tools available to address it. The third produced evidence the inquiry has not been asked to receive. None of it amounts to the sustained pressure this process requires.

Kemi Badenoch welcomed the announcement. Her word was "significantly strengthened." That word acknowledges the terms were weak to begin with. The weakness has not been corrected.

The Conservative Party published its own proposed terms of reference. Those terms required examination of family and clan networks, the specific biraderi structures at the heart of organised abuse in town after town across the north, which the current terms do not name.

Badenoch's own proposed terms required all recommendations to carry deadlines and a monitoring mechanism to ensure delivery. They allowed the inquiry chair to apply either the civil or criminal standard of proof when making findings of fact. Neither provision appears in what was announced on Tuesday.

Badenoch asked for those things. She did not get them. She celebrated getting ethnicity into scope and a press conference pledge on politicians. She called the result significantly strengthened and handed the government the cross-party cover it needed to declare the terms settled. The survivors who contacted her office did not ask her to accept less than she demanded. She accepted it anyway.

Farage said on the record he has absolutely no faith the inquiry will deliver justice for victims. He called any inquiry without the power to subpoena those who turned the collective blind eye a waste of space and described everything this government has done as an attempt to kick the can down the road. Farage understands what a fit-for-purpose inquiry requires.

The question is what Reform does with that understanding beyond issuing public statements of what they will do once in power.

Reform has MPs in Westminster. Parliamentary mechanisms exist that could force the government to answer on every milestone written into these terms. Written questions and urgent questions can be deployed before the three-month selection criteria window closes. The Home Affairs Select Committee, the body that already has Shaun Davies sitting on it, can be pressured to examine whether the terms are being implemented or quietly managed. The six-month MoU deadline, the annual review, and the Beaconport date gap are parliamentary pressure points that could be owned publicly and systematically. Neither has been announced or deployed.

Reform has councillors in the towns where this happened. In Bradford, Rochdale, Huddersfield and Oldham, Reform has a local presence with access to council proceedings, the ability to table motions demanding cooperation with the inquiry, and the power to force scrutiny committee examinations of whether their councils intend to supply evidence to the selection process openly or obstruct it quietly.

The councils that spent years resisting scrutiny are now being asked to supply the evidence on which the inquiry's selection criteria will be built. Reform councillors in those towns could force that process into the open before it produces a list designed to exclude the towns that matter most. That power has not been exercised.

Reform has a direct line to a voter base watching this issue and a media platform reaching them daily. Every deadline in these terms is a public test. The three-month selection criteria window and the six-month MoU are the most immediate. These are the mechanisms by which a managed process is constructed. The question is whether they are also used to prevent it.

Survivors are watching to see whether Reform uses what it has to force this one toward the standard Farage himself described.

Rupert Lowe conducted a private investigation into grooming gangs and found evidence of child sexual exploitation in 85 local authorities across the United Kingdom. Oldham is the only area the national inquiry has confirmed. That evidence must be submitted to the inquiry in full and the inquiry must be compelled to act on it. Otherwise, what is the point?

The Case Against This Cover Up

In Part One, I detailed how the concessions forced from this government have been examined and found wanting. Part Two has mapped the failures the terms were built to protect. Part Three will set out why this process cannot be trusted and what this campaign demands before it produces another managed report that nobody has to answer for.

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I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. They tried to imprison me to stop what you now know to be true.

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