WHY IS REFORM CONTINUING THE KIRKLEES RAPE GANG COVER-UP?
WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR SARAH WOOD TO CALL A VOTE DEMANDING THAT KIRKLEES IS NAMED.
AT LEAST 36 GIRLS, ONE OF THEM 12, WERE RAPED, SOLD AND PASSED BETWEEN MEN IN HUDDERSFIELD, DEWSBURY AND BATLEY BETWEEN 1994 AND 2013. MORE THAN 90 PEOPLE HAVE BEEN JAILED FOR MORE THAN 1,100 YEARS. SIXTEEN MORE WOMEN HAVE GONE TO THE POLICE ABOUT RAPES GOING BACK TO 1990.
KIRKLEES COUNCIL KNEW IN 2007 AND CALLED A RAPED CHILD 'VERY PROMISCUOUS'. WHEN THE FIRST MEN WERE JAILED, LABOUR BLOCKED A STATUTORY INQUIRY. THE COUNCIL HIRED DR MARK PEEL TO HELP HIDE THE SCALE OF WHAT TOOK PLACE. PEEL SPOKE TO NO GIRL AND NAMED NO ONE IN HIS REPORT. REFORM NOW LEADS THE COUNCIL. ITS LEADER IS ENDORSING PEEL's REPORT. WHY?
The cover-up of the rape of children in Kirklees is continuing under a Reform council. A national inquiry exists with the power to put council officers under oath. Kirklees Council has dodged that since 2018. So why are Reform refusing to call a council meeting and demand it investigates Kirklees?
AT LEAST 36 GIRLS WERE RAPED AND 16 MORE WOMEN ARE WAITING
Men raped children in every part of this borough for two decades. Kirklees Council has not answered for a single one of those girls. Police identified 22 young women in the Huddersfield trials. The girls were aged between 11 and 17. The men were mainly of Pakistani heritage. They got the girls drunk, raped them and passed them to other men. Forty-two men were convicted and given 505 years.
Grace Hammond
Men raped and trafficked eight girls in Dewsbury and Batley between 1999 and 2012. Their evidence put 28 men in prison for almost 400 years by 31 July 2024. One of the 28 was sentenced in his absence.
Men raped three other girls in Dewsbury and Batley between 1995 and 2003. One of them was 12 when it started. Twenty people were jailed for 277 years.
On 20 May 2026 three men were jailed for what they did to two Kirklees girls between 2002 and 2005. One of those women said she watched her father cry and say he had failed to protect his little girl.
A Dewsbury girl was 13 in 1994 when older boys and men gave her alcohol and abused her. Zahid Hussain was the first, at a party. She stopped going to school. At 16 she went to work in a takeaway owned by Jagtar Sahota, who raped her repeatedly between 1997 and 2000. Four men were jailed over her in 2026.
Police were investigating reports from sixteen more women in November 2026. Ten reported rapes between 1990 and 1996, five reported rapes between 2000 and 2009, and one reported in 2023 that she was raped and trafficked from the age of 14. Police have arrested men over every one of them.
Men were jailed because girls and women went to the police. The first was a young woman who walked into a police station with her mother in late 2013 and told officers she had been sexually abused.
Robert Sutcliffe
KIRKLEES COUNCIL KNEW AND WROTE THE GIRLS OFF
Kirklees Council was told and did nothing. In November 2007 a social worker recorded that a 16 year old girl with a learning difficulty was being sexually exploited. The council's answer was to call a child who was being raped "very promiscuous".
A mother went to the council about her own daughter. She told it the girl was getting into cars with men for drugs, alcohol and sex. She also handed over the names of two other girls. The council left all three girls with the men. I believe it ignored that mother because it had already decided what kind of girls these were.
Conservative Robert Light led the council when that file was written. Labour's Mehboob Khan led it from 2009. Both men ran a council that knew a disabled child was being sold.
Kirklees Council knew men were raping girls in Batley by July 2013. A Kirklees licensing panel of three councillors took away the licence of the Alder House Hotel in Batley, because teenage girls had been given alcohol and drugs and raped there.
Joanne Douglas
LABOUR AND THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS GUTTED THE INQUIRY
Leeds Crown Court finished convicting the first 20 Huddersfield men in October 2018, for more than 120 offences against 15 girls. Kirklees councillors were asked on 7 November 2018 to back a statutory inquiry. The Conservative motion called for one under the Inquiries Act 2005, which is the law that forces witnesses to attend and give evidence under oath.
Tony Earnshaw
Shabir Pandor was the Labour leader of the council. Labour and the Liberal Democrats rewrote the motion to ask for an inquiry into the whole of England and Wales instead of Kirklees. Pandor said the matter was "bigger than what is happening in Kirklees". Girls were being raped in his own borough. His answer was to talk about everywhere else.
No statutory inquiry into Kirklees followed. I believe Pandor and every councillor who voted with him did it to keep Kirklees Council out of the witness box.
KIRKLEES COUNCIL USED PEEL TO COVER UP WHAT IT KNEW
The council gave the girls a review it controlled in place of the inquiry it had killed. Its chief executive hired Dr Mark Peel, a social work academic, to write a report the council owned. Police gave him the names of 22 young women from the Huddersfield trials. He read the 15 files the council held on them.
Peel did not speak to the girls or to the staff. He did not see a police file. Even the man the council hired wrote that it was no public inquiry. The council said sorry for two girls. It named nobody responsible.
Peel's excuse for the council was that its staff were not looking, when its own 2007 file shows they saw it and wrote it down. Not one girl from Dewsbury or Batley was among his 22 names. I am certain that Kirklees Council has used a review of 15 Huddersfield files to cover up what it knew about the rape of at least 36 girls.
KIRKLEES THREW LABOUR OUT TO END THE COVER-UP
The people of Kirklees wiped Labour off the council on 7 May 2026. Reform UK won 29 of the 69 seats on a promise to end the cover-up.
The 20 people jailed over Dewsbury and Batley were named 12 days after that election. Their trials had run under reporting restrictions since July 2023. Kirklees went to the polls without being told that 20 more people had been jailed for raping its children. I believe the people of Kirklees had a right to know that before they voted.
The inquiry Labour blocked in 2018 now exists. The Statutory Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs, chaired by Baroness Anne Longfield, has the powers of the Inquiries Act. Kirklees had a council elected to open the files and an inquiry with the power to make its officers talk.
INSTEAD, SARAH WOOD POSTED A LETTER AND HID BEHIND PEEL
Reform betrayed that vote. Sarah Wood, the Reform UK leader of Kirklees Council, was elected to end a cover-up. Instead, she posted a letter.
Wood asked Longfield on 14 August 2026 to consider Kirklees "should you consider that doing so would assist the Inquiry". The leader of a council that left raped children with their rapists asked whether investigating it might help.
Her letter promised that Reform would "not shy away from rigour, detail or scrutiny". She told Longfield the council had already taken part in two independent reviews. One of them was Peel. She did not tell Longfield that Peel spoke to nobody and never looked at Dewsbury or Batley.
Pandor had Peel's review announced before the 2018 vote. He used it to keep an inquiry out of Kirklees. Wood gave Peel to the inquiry in 2026 as proof that the council had been examined. Intentional or otherwise, this makes Reform part of the cover-up.
Longfield named Bradford and London on 24 June 2026, then Birmingham and Wales on 30 September 2026. She did not name Kirklees. A letter from a leader asks. A motion carried by the full council demands. No such motion had been put to a vote in Kirklees.
Forcing that vote takes five councillors. Under the Local Government Act 1972, five members of a council can force an extraordinary meeting without the leader's permission. Reform has 27.
Wood told the council chamber on 20 May 2026 that she did not know what an amendment was. By November 2026 she has had six months to find out what a motion is.
Reform and the Conservatives held 35 of the 69 seats between them, which is a majority of one. Sarah Wood has the votes, She refuses to use them. Why? I believe Reform is afraid of what the inquiry would find inside the council it now runs.
REFORM HAS TO FORCE THE VOTE
Sarah Wood has to put a motion to the full council demanding that the national inquiry names Kirklees. The Conservatives will vote for the inquiry they asked for in 2018. The motion will pass. All it needs is for Wood to call the meeting
Bradford was named after our campaign pushed the Conservatives into calling an extraordinary meeting of the council. Birmingham was named after we exposed the Jesson Report and the council was forced to republish it.
Reform took our votes on this. Never did I think we would be arguing with Reform councillors to call a meeting to safeguard little White girls from gang rape.
The fight to secure a National Statutory Inquiry into the rape gangs took the best part of a decade. Now we face another battle. Making sure it investigates the places, the people and the institutions that spent decades avoiding accountability.
And Kirklees is precisely why this matters.
Red Wall and the Rabble is now more than 16,000 strong. In the last six months, over 1,250 people have committed to a paid subscription. More than 3000,000 people have read one of my investigations this year.
We fought for Oldham. We helped bring pressure to bear in Bradford, Birmingham and across Wales. None of it was handed to us.
Now I am having to challenge Reform UK in Kirklees, just as I have challenged Labour politicians in Oldham and elsewhere. I do not care which political party is in charge. I care about the children who were raped, the institutions that failed them and the people who must be held accountable.
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Thank You
Raja Miah MBE