Grooming gangs in the UK commit sexual offences against two children every day, shocking new analysis has revealed.

       The landmark study, called the Hydrant Programme, collected data from all 43 police forces across England and Wales, revealing 717 child exploitation grooming crimes in 2023 and 572 in the first nine months of 2024.

       The Hydrant Programme is the first national police scheme to collect and analyse "group-based" child sexual abuse using police records, which include the ethnic backgrounds of the criminals.

       It follows Alexis Jay’s 2022 Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which criticised the police for "widespread failure" to collect "good quality" data on victims, their abusers, and the crimes committed.

       The inquiry warned of the "one-sided and often uninformed debate" created about the ethnic backgrounds of groomers as a result of a failure to provide accurate data.

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       Jay said this led to lower conviction rates as police struggle to track down offenders, and hampered support for victims.

       The Hydrant Programme found group-based offending accounted for 3.7% of all child sexual abuse and exploitation crimes in 2023.

       That year, there were 4,228 group-based offences, 717 of which were perpetrated by grooming gangs. A horrifying 26% of group-based offences involved two or more abusers from the same family.

       In terms of race, 83% of perpetrators were white, 7% were Asian, 5% were black, and 3% were mixed race. However, these figures only account for 34% of suspects because ethnicity is only recorded once they've been interviewed.

       Richard Fewkes, director of the Hydrant Programme, told The Telegraph: "In very general terms, what we see across all group based offending is that no particular ethnicity stands out based on population data.

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       "Our point is that wherever a child is at threat, wherever a child has been abused, that response should be robust right the way across the board, whoever’s committed it, whatever colour their skin, whatever religion they are, the policing response should be robust."

       This comes after Labour blocked an inquiry into grooming gangs after Sir Keir Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service during the Oldham scandal.

       When he was the director of public prosecutions, Sir Keir was forced to address the issue of groomers not having action taken against them due to concerns about their race, as many were British-Pakistani.

       He said in 2012: "In a number of cases presented to us, particularly in cases involving groups, there’s clearly an issue of ethnicity that has to be understood and addressed. As prosecutors we shouldn’t shy away from that."