Rotherham chief resigns but no current child protection staff blamed over failings

No council employees will face disciplinary action in a town where 1,400 children suffered sexual exploitation in a 16-year period, the local authority’s chief executive has said.

Rotherham Council leader Roger Stone resigned today following the publication of a shocking report which detailed gang rapes, grooming, trafficking and other sexual exploitation on a wide scale in the South Yorkshire town.

But council chief executive Martin Kimber (pictured) said he did not have the evidence to discipline any individuals working for the council despite the report saying there had been “blatant” collective failures by its leadership at the time.

Mr Kimber said: “Officers in senior positions responsible for children’s safeguarding services throughout the critical periods when services fell some way short of today’s standards do not work for the council today.

“To that extent, I have not been able to identify any issues of professional practice related to current serving officers of this council that would require me to consider use of disciplinary or capability procedures.”

Mr Stone said in a statement: “Having considered the report, I believe it is only right that I, as leader, take responsibility on behalf of the council for the historic failings that are described so clearly in the report and it is my intention to do so.

“For this reason, I have today agreed with my Labour group colleagues that I will be stepping down as leader with immediate effect.”

Professor Alexis Jay, who wrote the report, said she found examples of “children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally-violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone”.

She said: “They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated.”

She said she found that girls as young as 11 had been raped by large numbers of men.

Mr Kimber suggested the current employers of senior managers who have worked for Rotherham Council in the past should study the report carefully.

Questioned repeatedly about why nobody had faced disciplinary action, he said: “I think it is extremely important that people take responsibility and are accountable for their decisions.”

Mr Kimber said: “I cannot find anything that is sufficiently explicit about any single individual to make any professional practice referral. If I felt that that report did contain such information then you can take it from me that I would have no hesitation in either making that referral or making a recommendation to the council to take action.

“What I have said is that there are people still in professional practice today who were working for Rotherham during the critical periods and it’s really important that their current employers read this report for their own judgments as to their particular role at that time.”

The report said failures of the political and officer leadership of Rotherham Council over the first 12 years she looked at were “blatant” as the seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers and was not seen as a priority by South Yorkshire Police.

Prof Jay said police “regarded many child victims with contempt”.

These failures happened despite three reports between 2002 and 2006 “which could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham”.

She said the first of these reports was “effectively suppressed” because senior officers did not believe the data.

The other two were ignored, the professor said.

The report said: “By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims.”

But, she said, councillors seemed to think is was a one-off problem which they hoped would go away and “several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist”.

She said: “Others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”

The spotlight first fell on Rotherham in 2010 when five men, described by a judge as “sexual predators”, were given lengthy jail terms after they were found guilty of grooming teenage girls for sex.

The prosecution was the first of a series of high-profile cases in the last four years that have revealed the exploitation of young girls in towns and cities including Rochdale, Derby and Oxford.

Following the 2010 case, The Times claimed that details from 200 restricted-access documents showed how police and child protection agencies in the South Yorkshire town had extensive knowledge of these activities for a decade, yet a string of offences went unprosecuted.

The allegations led to a range of official investigations, including one by the Home Affairs Select Committee.

Last year, South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner (PCC) Shaun Wright said there had been “a failure of management” at South Yorkshire Police as he responded to a report into his force on this issue by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC).

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