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A minister has said the government has “full confidence” in Jess Phillips after four abuse survivors called for her resignation as a condition for their participation in the national grooming gangs inquiry.
The crisis engulfing the inquiry deepened on Wednesday as the four survivors accused Phillips of “betrayal” and said she was “unfit to oversee a process that requires survivors to trust the government”.
But a government minister insisted on Thursday that Phillips would “stay in post” as safeguarding minister, saying she was “a lifelong advocate and champion for young girls who’ve been abused”.
Josh MacAlister, the children’s minister, said Phillips had the “full backing of the prime minister and the home secretary”.
“She has already shown that she is properly engaging with the survivor community,” he told Sky News.
Ministers are scrambling to get to grips with the inquiry and find a new chair to lead it after both candidates they had identified – former social worker Annie Hudson and former police officer Jim Gamble – withdrew this week.
Phillips has come under fire from survivors amid claims that the government sought to broaden the scope of the inquiry from grooming gangs to other forms of child abuse for political reasons.
Gamble, who withdrew from the process blaming political “point-scoring” for creating a “highly charged and toxic environment”, said he nevertheless had confidence in Phillips, telling BBC Breakfast on Thursday: “Has she got everything right, I don’t think so, but none of us have.”
David Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that while it was important to listen to victims, “four victims out of the 30 who are on the advisory panel calling for someone’s resignation should not per se result in their resignation.”
“Jess Phillips has been one of the most vehement, strong advocates against abuse of women and girls in the government — in any government that I’ve known since Ann Cryer back in the 2000s.” Cryer raised the alarm about allegations of grooming gangs operating in her Keighley constituency in 2003.
In response to allegations that the government had sought to manipulate the process, Gamble said he was told he would be able to set the terms of reference as chair.
“At no time did I get the impression that they wanted to shy away from the necessary focus to understand why race, ethnicity and culture is part of the problem with particular gangs in this, and there was nothing that I saw that would inhibit me from addressing that,” he said.
Survivors have accused the government of sidelining them and seeking to broaden the inquiry to include other forms of sexual abuse. They suspect ministers of trying to deflect focus away from Labour-led councils and avoid raising questions over the ethnicity of the perpetrators, many of whom were men of Pakistani descent.
Phillips said earlier this week that it was “untrue” the government was seeking to dilute the focus of the inquiry, insisting its scope would be “laser-focused”. In a letter to Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, the four survivors criticised Phillips for rejecting their accounts.
“Being publicly contradicted and dismissed by a government minister when you are a survivor telling the truth takes you right back to that feeling of not being believed all over again. It is a betrayal that has destroyed what little trust remained,” they said.
MacAlister told Sky News on Thursday that the scope of the inquiry was “absolutely going to be focused” on grooming gangs.
Keir Starmer has appointed Louise Casey, a civil service troubleshooter, to “support the work of the inquiry” in an attempt to get the process back on track. The prime minister told the Commons on Wednesday that the inquiry “is not and will never be watered down” and its scope “will not change”.
