The Rape Gang Inquiry

Chair, team and panel

• Mr Lowe chaired the inquiry and signs its report as "Rape Gang Inquiry Chair".
• The inquiry team was led by Sammy Woodhouse, the Rotherham survivor and campaigner.
• Three sitting MPs sat on the panel: Esther McVey, Nick Timothy and Carla Lockhart.
• Larger donations on the public crowdfunder included £15,000 in total from businesswoman Margaret Hepburn and £5,000 each from Ben Habib and from Mr Lowe himself.

How Lowe framed it

"We shouldn't have to do this, it should be the Government. But as we know, that is not happening."

"I fully understand that this inquiry isn't perfect, and we don't have statutory powers."

"Participating in our hearings, listening to the survivors, was the most harrowing experience of my life."

• That "at the very least, 250,000 young white girls" have been victims — a figure the report footnotes to remarks by Lord Pearson of Rannoch in the House of Lords in May 2019, not to government data.
• That around 87% of those convicted in group-based CSE cases "bore distinctively Muslim names" — footnoted to a 2018 article by the campaign group Christian Concern.
• That gangs operated in at least 149 local authority districts — close to 40% of districts in the UK, per the report's own compiled list.

Note: a companion website publishes different figures from the report itself (for example 140,066+ estimated victims and 49% "distinctively Muslim names"), which underlines how contested the underlying numbers are.

• Nationally funded Independent Sexual Violence Advisers, with victims placed at the centre of the criminal justice process.
• Life imprisonment as the statutory starting point for group-based CSE, with minimum tariffs of 50 years for ringleaders and 25 for participants, and a ban on concurrent sentencing where there are multiple victims.
• Deportation of every foreign national convicted of group-based CSE, and automatic, retrospective loss of citizenship for convicted dual nationals.
• Investigation, and possible closure, of institutions found to have harboured perpetrators.
• Stated next steps: publishing witness statements, naming alleged enablers in Parliament under privilege, and initiating civil proceedings and private prosecutions.

The Casey audit (June 2025) found offender ethnicity was unrecorded in roughly two-thirds of group-based CSE cases and concluded the full scale of the harm cannot be assessed from existing data. All twelve of its recommendations — including mandatory ethnicity and nationality recording for child sexual abuse suspects — were accepted in full by the government.

This site's British girls page collects the official statistics that do exist.

• An independent methodological review (Thom Aster, June 2026) traced the 250,000 figure to the 2019 Lords remarks rather than data, noted the 87% statistic rests on a third-party campaign group's 2018 analysis, and observed that ethnicity recording was not mandatory for most of the period covered.
• Left Foot Forward (August 2025) examined the crowdfunder's larger donors and raised transparency questions about the inquiry's funding.
• The report itself concedes the absence of statutory powers meant some people in prominent positions declined to give evidence.

• On 23 June 2025 a member of the public complained that Mr Lowe had failed to register crowdfunder donations within the 28-day rule.
• The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg CB, opened a formal inquiry on 10 July 2025.
• Mr Lowe's office produced an audit trail showing it had sought Electoral Commission guidance on launch day, and that the thirteen donations over £1,500 were only formally accepted from the platform on 23 June 2025.
• The case was closed the next day, 11 July 2025, as not upheld: the 28-day registration period had not elapsed, so no rule was breached.

• On publication day, 16 June 2026, Mr Lowe tabled Early Day Motion 380 (session 2026–27), "Independent Rape Gang Inquiry Report", calling on the government to engage formally with its findings. It had six signatures as of 22 June 2026.
• In a Westminster Hall debate on child sexual offender data on 1 June 2026, he told MPs he wanted "the world to hear what we heard during the two weeks of our independent rape gang inquiry hearings".
• He has tabled numerous related written questions and EDMs, including on overseas trafficking by rape gangs.