The National Crime Agency has referred eight closed grooming gang cases back to police forces, ordering that they be reopened and reinvestigated. The move marks a new phase in the agency's effort to take a fresh look at investigations that may not have been pursued as far as they should have been the first time around.
The eight cases are part of a much wider review. The NCA has been going through hundreds of files in which potential lines of inquiry may have been missed because of human error, with the aim of identifying those that warrant another look by the forces that originally handled them.
The scale of that review is considerable. According to the account given, there were around 1,200 cases that the NCA had been made aware of, sent to it by 23 police forces back in November, where the concern about human error had been raised. The eight now being sent back are the first to be returned for reinvestigation out of that larger pool.
The agency has not said where those eight cases are or which forces are involved, citing the need to protect operational security and allow the work to progress. What is known is that the cases will be reopened, and that in some of them the suspects are still alive and there had not previously been a review.
The cases being reopened all took place from at least 2010. That sets them apart from the separate National Inquiry, which is looking further back, into the 1990s as well, with different terms of reference covering its own scale and scope of investigation.
The reinvestigations are being carried out under a programme known as Operation Beacon Port. The announcement comes on the first anniversary of a major report by Baroness Louise Casey, lending added weight to the day on which the agency confirmed that the first batch of cases would be sent back for a fresh examination.