Elon Musk has made “misinformed” and “misjudged” comments about the government’s response to grooming gangs in the UK, the health secretary has said.
Wes Streeting also urged the tech billionaire and owner of X to “roll his sleeves up” and help the government tackle child sex abuse and exploitation online.
Mr Streeting was asked about the increasingly active interest Mr Musk has taken in British politics – he will also become US president-elect Donald Trump’s efficiency tsar this month.
Mr Musk, who has spoken positively about Reform UK on X and is reportedly considering making a donation to Nigel Farage’s party, has been critical of the government’s handling of child sexual exploitation across a number of towns and cities more than a decade ago.
He has claimed Sir Keir Starmer had failed to bring “rape gangs” to justice when he led the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). In 2013, Sir Keir introduced new guidelines for how child sexual abuse victims should be treated and how a case should be built and presented in court.
Mr Musk also argued that safeguarding minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be in prison” after she rejected requests from Oldham Council for a national inquiry into instances of child sexual exploitation in the town.
Asked by reporters whether Mr Musk’s comments were “unhelpful”, Mr Streeting said: “Some of the criticisms that Elon Musk has made, I think are a misjudged and and certainly misinformed.
“But we’re willing to work with Elon Musk. I think he’s got a big role to play with his social media platform to help us and other countries to tackle this serious issue. So if he wants to work with us, roll his sleeves up. We’d welcome that.”
The health secretary also said he believed that “political correctness was able to get in the way of going off the perpetrators of these serious crimes.”
He added: “We’re not going to let that happen.”
Outling her reasons for rejecting an inquiry into Oldham, Ms Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, said that while she recognised the “strength of feeling” over the matter, she believed it was for “Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to intervene”.
But in a post on X, Mr Musk claimed “the real reason she’s [Ms Phillips] refusing to investigate the rape gangs is that it would obviously lead to the blaming of Keir Stamer (head of the CPS at the time).”
Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, has called for a national inquiry into the grooming scandal while shadow ministers have written to Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, asking that she reverse the decision not to hold a national inquiry into Oldham.
“Only a statutory inquiry can adequately encompass the national nature of these crimes and issues” and consider whether reports were ignored by the police, CPS and local council “or even covered up”, the letter read.
However, a letter to Oldham Council written in 2002 by Amanda Solloway, then the Conservative safeguarding minister, later emerged and showed she had also rejected a previous request from the local authority for the government to set up a public inquiry.
Instead, like Ms Phillips, Ms Solloway argued in favour of a locally commissioned inquiry.
In 2022, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse published its final report, in which it described the sexual abuse of children as an “epidemic that leaves tens of thousands of victims in its poisonous wake”.
Led by Professor Alexis Jay – who also uncovered the scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham – the inquiry looked into abuse by organised groups following multiple convictions of sexual offences against children across the UK between 2010-2014.
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It recommended that institutions that work with children should be required by law to report suspicions of child sexual abuse.
In November last year, Prof Jay said she felt “frustrated” that none of the 20 recommendations put forward by the inquiry had been implemented more than two years after its conclusion.
Mr Streeting said the government was committed to implementing the recommendations of Professor Jay’s report “in full”.
“This government is committed to implementing the recommendations of the inquiry into child sexual abuse,” he said.
“We will do that in full. We will get on with the job.”