Starmer summoned as core participant in grooming gangs inquiry

Sir Keir Starmer has been listed as a core participant in the national grooming gangs inquiry and will be summoned to give evidence.

The Prime Minister, who announced the inquiry last year, now faces formal scrutiny over how institutions failed children for years. GB News understands he is among those required to appear as the process moves from announcement to hard questioning.

National Accountability Hearings will open in London in December and January. Further sessions are set for March and April next year. The inquiry will test why earlier probes and investigations never produced “meaningful change”.

It will also ask why lessons were not learned and will force institutions and organisations to set out what they actually did to protect children. Hearings begin with the experiences of victims and survivors before turning to previous national and local findings.

Baroness Anne Longfield leads the inquiry. The focus is institutional responses. Sir Keir is expected to give evidence in that phase. Other core participants already named include Greater Manchester Police whistleblower Maggie Oliver and Rotherham whistleblower Jayne Senior.

Whitehall is being pulled in as well. The ministries of justice, education and transport, among other departments, have been summoned. The Welsh Government, the Local Government Association and Manchester City Council will also be called to give evidence.

Britain cannot keep burying this scandal under process and delay. Children were failed while agencies looked the other way, and the public is entitled to see those who held power answer for it in the open. Accountability means names, dates and decisions on the record, not another round of soft language.

What the hearings will cover

The sequence is deliberate. Survivors speak first. Then the inquiry revisits what earlier reports already found. Only after that do the institutions explain themselves. That order matters. It puts the harm at the centre before the excuses.

Starmer’s status as a core participant means he is not a distant observer. He will be required to attend and answer. The same demand falls on police, councils and Whitehall departments that sat on evidence or failed to act when girls were being abused.

The coming months will show whether this inquiry delivers the straight answers previous efforts never managed. London hearings in winter, then more in the spring, leave little room for drift. Victims have waited long enough. The country needs the full picture of who failed, when, and why the system protected itself instead of the children.

Original source: GB News