Story updated 2 April 2025
Professionals and others in positions of trust in relation to children will face a duty to report child sexual abuse (CSA).
Home secretary Yvette Cooper announced yesterday that the government would be reviving the mandatory reporting policy, dropped by its Conservative predecessors on the eve of the 2024 election.
The idea was one of the key recommendations from the 2022 final report of the seven-year Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), and was designed to address historic under-reporting of CSA by practitioners and others in a position of trust over children.
Watered down mandatory reporting plans
Though accepted by the Conservatives, the previous government watered down IICSA's recommendations in two key respects:- There would be no requirement to report CSA in cases where recognised indicators of abuse were present. Instead, the duty would only apply where a person had observed CSA or a perpetrator or victim had disclosed it, which the inquiry found or implied were relatively rare.
- There would be no criminal sanction for anyone who did not report cases of witnessed or disclosed abuse. Instead, they would be referred to the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) to be potentially barred from working with children, with professionals referred to regulators for further sanctions.
Pledge to introduce criminal sanction
In a statement to the House of Commons yesterday, Cooper said that the Crime and Policing Bill would make it "an offence with professional and criminal sanctions to fail to report or cover up child sexual abuse".However, when the Crime and Policing Bill was published in February 2025, it did not include a sanction for failing to comply with the duty to report; instead, there was only a duty for preventing or deterring a person with complying with their duty to report.*
In its report, IICSA said these included sexualised or sexually harmful behaviour, physical signs of abuse or consequences of sexual abuse such as pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. While proposing that mandatory reporting should apply when indicators were present, it said failure to report should not be met by a criminal sanction, because of the complexity of identifying these factors.
Political row over CSE
The home secretary's statement came in the wake of a huge political row over the government's response to child sexual exploitation (CSE) by organised gangs.This followed the government's decision to reject a request from Oldham Council to set up a public inquiry into CSE in the borough to address gaps the authority had identified in a 2022 review into the issue.
In a letter to the authority, sent in October 2024, safeguarding minister Jess Phillips said it was for the authority itself to commission a fresh inquiry, citing the positive impact of previous local reviews, in Rotherham and Telford.
When news of the letter became public last week, X owner Elon Musk posted that Phillips - who had a long career in tackling violence against women and girls before becoming an MP - should be imprisoned for the decision, while the Conservatives also criticised the decision to reject Oldham's request.
Prime minister Keir Starmer attacked Musk's intervention - though without naming him - and defended Phillips in a statement yesterday (source: politics.co.uk). Meanwhile, Cooper called on MPs to respect the historic cross-party consensus on tackling CSE and showing respect for victims and survivors, while rejecting online misinformation.
Other pledges on tackling abuse and exploitation
Alongside her announcement on mandatory reporting, she also pledged to:- Create a new performance framework, with data collection requirements, for the police concerning CSA and CSE. This responds to IICSA's recommendation to introduce a core data set for the issue, to tackle what it found was a lack of reliable data, particularly in relation to CSE. The inquiry said the data set should include information on the characteristics of victims and alleged perpetrators of CSA/CSE, including age, sex and ethnicity, the factors that make children more vulnerable to abuse or exploitation and the settings in which abuse or exploitation occur.
- Legislate to make grooming an aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sexual offences, a recommendation from IICSA's 2022 report on CSE by organised networks.
- Set up a victims and survivors panel to work with the government on implementing reforms to CSA and CSE.
