Oldham Liberal Democrats have said that due care must be taken with responses to the independent inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Oldham, to be released on Monday, and it “must be viewed in the knowledge of the terrible and lasting impact CSE has had on the lives of many of this borough’s most vulnerable young people”.

The report is being released with a background of serial failings of the senior management of Greater Manchester Police, including the botched introduction and inadequacies of the now-abandoned iOPS computer system, and the force being placed into special measures.

Liberal Democrat spokesperson Sam Al-Hamdani said: “People must know that Oldham Council, the police, and the services that they rely on have changed, and will continue to change, so that others will not have to go through what they did.

“When the report is released, we will need to take the time to fully understand its implications. Anything else would be a flippant response. The people who are most important in this whole process are the survivors of abuse and exploitation, and we must ensure first and foremost that any action now taken by the Council, the Police and our partner agencies makes a difference for them.”

While the inquiry has been progressing, the Liberal Democrats have been pursuing a sizable number of initiatives to reduce child sexual exploitation, tackle domestic violence, and aid the detection and apprehension of sexual predators and violent offenders.

Group Leader Howard Sykes has pursued a change of legislation, now going through Parliament, to disbar sex offenders from standing as councillors or holding public office. He also brought  a motion to Council supporting  children’s charity, the NSPCC’s Closing the Loophole campaign, and has since raised this issue in Parliament and in correspondence with the new Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice.

Deputy Leader Chris Gloster also worked with the charity Paladin to highlight the need for a new national  register identifying those offenders who are stalking or commit domestic violence to safeguard victims and aid the Police in tracking and apprehending them, and Sam Al-Hamdani brought a motion to Council calling for  street harassment to be criminalised.

Councillor Al-Hamdani also wrote to the Council’s Chief Executive in 2019 to ask for advanced training to combat CSE, which eventually led to the first course of its kind in the UK being delivered by Barnardo’s. The group also got a promise from the Council to implement findings from the national Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse (IICSA).

He added: “We did not wait for the report to come in to take action, and have been working hard to bring forward as much as we could to change the Council’s approach to CSE, and to address the failings of the management of GMP and it’s appalling iOPS system.

“Abuse and exploitation take many forms. We must address each of them honestly, and recognise that at the heart of this is a failure to properly get to grips with violence and misogyny.”