MP slams ‘too busy’ Patel on grooming gang meet
ROCHDALE’S MP has slammed the Home Secretary for failing to meet him to discuss the deportation of members of a grooming gang.
Tony Lloyd told the House of Commons that two years ago the Home Secretary undertook to deport members of the gang who were not British nationals during a meeting with him and the Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham.
But he said that despite asking for an update, the Home Secretary Priti Patel has said she is “too busy” to meet him to discuss the issue.
He told the Commons: “I raised the issue on the floor of the House in Home Office questions in November, and the Home Secretary indicated to a junior minister that she would meet me.
“Having had no meeting, I raised the issue again in Home Office questions in February, and the Home Secretary again undertook to meet me.
“I have now had a response from the Home Secretary’s office to say that she is too busy and to ask me to meet a junior minister.
“I am not asking you, Madam Deputy Speaker, to say whether the Home Secretary is embarrassed, as I am sure she is, about her failure to deliver, or whether she is sufficiently in charge of her department, which she is clearly not - those are not questions for you - but there is a real issue if any government minister gives an undertaking to any honorable member that they will meet, but then ultimately refuses that meeting.
“That is not accountability, which is what Parliament is about.
“How can you help me, Madam Deputy Speaker, in my pursuit of a real answer to the needs of the women who are the victims of child abusers?”
Last June the Observer reported that Adil Khan, then 51, and Qari Abdul Rauf, then 52, had been told they are to be sent back to Pakistan for the public good after both were part of a gang convicted of a catalogue of serious sex offences against young girls.
Both were appealing against the deportation order served on them, on the grounds of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – their right to a private and family life.
Khan got a 13-year-old girl pregnant but denied he was the father, then met another girl, 15, and trafficked her to others, using violence when she complained.
He was sentenced to eight years in 2012 and released on licence four years later.
Rauf, a father-of-five, trafficked a 15-year-old girl for sex, driving her to secluded areas to have sex with her in his taxi and ferrying her to a flat in Rochdale where he and others had sex with her.
He was jailed for six years and released in November 2014 after serving two years and six months of his sentence.
Both men were among four in the gang with dual Uk-pakistani citizenship, so liable to be stripped of UK citizenship and deported after then Home Secretary Theresa May ruled it would be ‘conducive to the public good’ to deprive the four of the right to remain in Britain.
They were part of a ninestrong gang of Asian men convicted of sex offences against vulnerable girls in 2012.
For two years from early 2008, girls as young as 12 were plied with alcohol and drugs and gang-raped in rooms above takeaway shops and ferried to different flats in taxis where cash was paid to use the girls.
Police said as many as 47 girls were groomed.
Khan, Rauf and another man, Abdul Aziz, then fought, and lost, a long legal battle against the deportation order, losing a final Court of Appeal ruling in 2018.
Replying to Mr Lloyd, Deputy Speaker Rosie Winterton said: “I am grateful to the hon. gentleman for his point of order and for giving me notice of it.
“It is absolutely right to say that if a particular minister commits personally to meeting a member, that minister should deliver on that commitment.
“It certainly sounds as though in this case the hon. gentleman has been kept waiting for too long for the meeting that was promised.”
She added: “I hope that those on the Treasury Bench will act on this exchange and make sure that the hon. gentleman is offered a meeting with the Home Secretary very soon.”