Birmingham currently has 98 child sexual exploitation investigations open, including six assessed as group-based.
But Birmingham’s Education Scrutiny Committee heard this week that West Midlands Police has only been improving its recording of suspect ethnicity over the last 12 months.
Asked why detailed suspect ethnicity data was not available for the CSE report, police said complex sexual offence investigations can take many months and warned it could be another “good year or two” before meaningful data can be provided.
The Committee was also told that “the suspect data isn’t routinely being captured”.
This comes despite Baroness Casey’s national audit warning about serious gaps in ethnicity data and calling for mandatory recording of ethnicity and nationality for CSE suspects.
Casey also found evidence warranting further examination of the disproportionate representation of men of Pakistani ethnicity in some areas. Her audit records that an earlier West Midlands Police CSE problem profile identified 75 grooming suspects, with 62% recorded as being from a Pakistani ethnic background.
At the Committee, Reform UK Birmingham’s Cllr Rachel Conaghan asked specifically about Birmingham’s six current group-based CSE investigations: how many suspects are involved, how many have ethnicity recorded, how many have nationality recorded and whether councillors could be provided with an anonymised aggregate breakdown.
That information wasn’t available at the meeting, but the Council indicated that there was no reason why the majority of it could not be provided and agreed to obtain it.
Cllr Rachel Conaghan said:
“Child sexual exploitation is an appalling crime and our first concern must always be protecting children and pursuing those responsible.
“But after years of warnings about the importance of understanding ethnicity in group-based CSE, I am deeply concerned that we are still being told in 2026 that suspect ethnicity recording has only recently improved and that meaningful data for these complex sexual offence investigations could still be another year or two away.
“Baroness Casey exposed just how inadequate the national data has been. Her response wasn’t to shy away from examining ethnicity - it was to demand better data.
“Nobody is asking the Council or police to draw conclusions that incomplete evidence cannot support. But incomplete data is a reason to improve the data, not to avoid examining what information is actually held.
“The Committee has been told that information can be obtained. I will be pressing to make sure we get it.”