The Daily Express has released an explosive investigation digging into Sir Keir Starmer’s record on grooming gangs during his time as Director of Public Prosecutions, focusing on the infamous Rochdale case that inspired the BBC drama Three Girls. In a new Express Report video, investigations editor Zak Garner-Purkis and whistleblower detective Maggie Oliver accuse Starmer’s Crown Prosecution Service of making “horrific” decisions that betrayed one of the key child victims, known publicly as “Amber”.

Starmer’s claim: ‘I oversaw the first grooming gang prosecution’

For years, Keir Starmer has cited Rochdale as proof that he took grooming gangs seriously while running the CPS. He has repeatedly claimed that he “oversaw the first grooming gang prosecution” and that he personally “walked through the decision-making from start to finish”, presenting the case as a model of how the system can protect vulnerable victims. In select committee evidence and later political interviews, he has insisted he changed the CPS approach after reviewing the file and that this new “good practice” was rolled out nationwide.

The Express investigation asks whether Rochdale really was the success story Starmer describes – or whether, behind the scenes, critical decisions taken on his watch badly failed some of the most vulnerable girls involved. To find out, the paper turned to former detective Maggie Oliver, who resigned from Greater Manchester Police over the handling of the case and has spent more than a decade fighting for the victims.

Maggie Oliver: key victim ‘Amber’ was betrayed

Oliver explains that when she joined the Rochdale investigation – codenamed Operation Span – there were around three dozen victims, including a girl portrayed as “Amber” in Three Girls. Amber had been wrongly arrested in 2009, but in early 2011 the head of the CPS North West complex case unit formally ruled she should be treated as a victim, not an offender. Oliver was then tasked with gaining Amber’s trust, spending months visiting her almost daily, taking detailed video interviews, identifying locations of abuse and helping her pick out abusers in ID parades.

According to Oliver, Amber named dozens of men who had raped and abused her and other children, and was regarded as one of the key witnesses in the case. But after months of work, Oliver says she was suddenly told that the CPS had decided Amber would no longer be used as a victim in the prosecution. An independent review years later found that none of Amber’s evidence had even been entered as crimes against her on police systems and that her testimony did not form part of the main Operation Span trial.

Oliver says the reason was simple: Amber’s evidence opened the case up far beyond the handful of defendants the authorities were prepared to take on. Rather than committing the resources needed to pursue all the suspects she had named – a list recorded in a document known as “Document 29” – the system moved to shut her out. The review concluded that the decision effectively cast dozens of other potential victims and offenders “to the wind”.

The ‘tactical option’ that labelled a child victim a paedophile

The most shocking claim in the investigation concerns what happened next. Oliver says that as the trial approached, senior figures realised the case could not proceed without Amber’s evidence because so many lines of inquiry flowed from her account. With only weeks to go, they faced a problem: how to get her testimony before a jury when she had been dropped as a victim.

Internal documents cited by the Express and Maggie Oliver suggest the CPS and police adopted what was described as a “tactical option” – to add Amber onto the indictment as if she were one of the grooming gang offenders. She was portrayed on the charge sheet as an “older madam” helping procure children for the men, even though she had already been formally recognised as a victim and was, at the time of the abuse, a child being exploited herself.

Oliver says Amber was never re-arrested, never cautioned, never offered legal representation and was never told she was being named on the indictment as part of the gang. She had no chance to defend herself and only later understood why, around the same time, social services tried to prevent her taking her newborn baby home from hospital by falsely claiming there was a court order against her. A judge ultimately threw out attempts to remove the child, but Oliver believes these actions were part of a wider effort to justify the decision to brand Amber a perpetrator rather than a victim.

The independent review commissioned by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham later condemned this tactic as a “deplorable further abuse” of a child sexual exploitation survivor. It found there was no evidence anyone had considered the impact on Amber’s safety or welfare, and criticised the CPS for showing unacceptable disregard for a vulnerable victim. In 2022, Greater Manchester Police formally apologised to Amber, acknowledged her as a victim and recorded her rapes – but, as Oliver points out, the CPS has never publicly apologised for or ruled out using the same “tactical option” again.

What this says about Keir Starmer’s record

Throughout the investigation, Maggie Oliver makes clear she lays ultimate responsibility at Keir Starmer’s door, as the head of the CPS at the time. She argues that approving or allowing a strategy which secretly turns a vulnerable child victim into an alleged paedophile on paper – just to get her evidence into court – is “inhumane”, “unlawful” and “wicked beyond belief”. In her view, no Director of Public Prosecutions who truly cared about victims could have condoned such an approach.

Oliver also notes that Starmer has built part of his political story around Rochdale and grooming gangs more broadly, frequently citing the case as proof of his commitment to protecting vulnerable children. She questions how the public can trust him to lead a new national inquiry into grooming gangs – or to fix the wider justice system – when, in her view, he has never fully owned or apologised for what happened to Amber and potentially other girls treated in a similar way.

The Express investigation closes by stressing that much of what is now known about Amber’s treatment only came to light because of later reviews, whistleblowing and legal challenges. Had Starmer not publicly linked himself to the Rochdale prosecution and claimed credit for it, his personal role might never have become a political issue. For survivors like Amber, Oliver argues, the real scandal is that “success” was claimed while some of the most vulnerable girls were sacrificed in the process.