Members of Britain’s notorious grooming gangs could be released after serving only half their prison sentences because of a loophole in the Labour government’s early-release scheme.
The Times reports that several men convicted of sexually abusing vulnerable girls may qualify despite Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s promise to exclude grooming offences from the policy.
The loophole applies to crimes committed before specific anti-grooming laws were introduced in 2003. Because the perpetrators were prosecuted under older offences such as indecent assault, they fall outside the government’s exemptions.
Among those who could benefit are Mohammed Imran Akram, Safraz Ahmed Latif, Wajid Hussain, Mohammed Naheem, and Nadeem Ali. The five men were jailed last year for abusing a Bradford girl from the age of 13 while she was in care.
They received sentences of between six and eight years—a combined total of 35 years—but some could now be released by the end of 2028.
Their victim said the men had taken away her “basic rights” and “stole my future.”
The disclosure is particularly explosive because it follows decades of official failure over Britain’s grooming gangs. Since at least the 1980s, groups composed predominantly of Pakistani-origin men have raped, trafficked, and abused vulnerable girls in towns including Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, and Bradford.
Many victims were white, working-class children living in care or unstable homes. Police, social workers, and local councils repeatedly failed to protect them, while officials feared that identifying the perpetrators’ ethnicity would inflame racial tensions or lead to accusations of racism.
A government audit led by Baroness Louise Casey last year found that some girls aged between 13 and 15 had been treated as willing participants in relationships with adult men. References to a perpetrator being Pakistani were even removed from one child’s file using correction fluid.
The scandal eventually forced Labour to announce a national inquiry, having previously resisted demands from the Conservatives and Reform UK.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the latest loophole amounted to another abandonment of the victims.
“On Tuesday, you told the country that those convicted of grooming offences would be excluded,” she wrote to Burnham. “Your own government has now put in writing that some of these men will be released early anyway.”
Victims’ Commissioner Claire Waxman said survivors had suffered renewed anxiety because many still did not know whether their abusers would be freed sooner.
The Ministry of Justice claimed that excluding more serious offenders could overwhelm Britain’s overcrowded prisons, leaving police unable to make arrests and courts unable to remand suspects.
Justice minister Jake Richards acknowledged public anger but ruled out extending the exemptions.
The government therefore faces accusations that, after the British state failed to protect vulnerable girls from organised abuse, it may now fail them again by releasing some of their attackers years ahead of schedule.
