A multi-million pound seven-year inquiry described child sexual abuse as an “epidemic” in England and Wales.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) looked at institutional failings and found there were tens of thousands of victims across the two nations when its final report was published in October 2022.

Laws compelling people in positions of trust to report child sexual abuse and a national compensation scheme for victims failed by the state and other institutions were among a raft of recommendations.

It also called on the former Conservative government to hire a cabinet-level children’s minister and establish a child protection authority in its 458-page report, which brought together its overall findings, as it urged politicians to act “promptly”.

When asked at the time how likely it was the changes recommended would be adopted, inquiry chairwoman Professor Alexis Jay told a press conference: “We don’t have the power to force the government to do it, but they should do it and need to do it.”

In January last year, some 15 months on, she vented her frustration that action had not yet been taken and repeated calls for the recommendations to be implemented – demands she reiterated again on Monday.

Resisting calls for another review specifically into grooming gangs, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said IICSA’s work had been extensive and blamed the previous government for failing to bring in the recommendations, adding that now was the time for “action”.

The £186.6 million inquiry, set up in 2015, looked at 15 areas scrutinising institutional responses to child sexual abuse – including grooming gangs, investigations into abuse in Westminster and the church – and more than 7,000 victims took part.

But the inquiry had to survive a number of early blows with resignations and blunders initially throwing the future of the inquiry into doubt.

Some 325 days of public hearings saw testimony from 725 witnesses – including three former prime ministers, an ex-director general of MI5, victims, senior police officers and church leaders – while 2.5 million pages of evidence were processed and scores of reports published with 87 recommendations already made as a result.

In an earlier damning report, the inquiry found there were “extensive failures” in the way child sexual exploitation by criminal gangs was tackled, with police and authorities potentially downplaying the scale of abuse over concerns about negative publicity.

According to the February 2022 findings, which looked specifically at grooming gangs, child victims – some of whom reported being raped, abused, and in one case forced to perform sex acts on a group of 23 men while held at gunpoint – were often blamed by authorities for the ordeals they suffered while some were even slapped with criminal records for offences closely linked to their sexual exploitation.

The inquiry found there was “a flawed assumption” that child sexual exploitation was “on the wane”, with councils and police forces denying the scale of the problem, despite evidence to the contrary.

IICSA concluded this might be down to a determination to assure they are not seen as “another Rochdale or Rotherham” – towns blighted by recent child sexual exploitation revelations – rather than a desire to “root out… and expose its scale”.

At the time Prof Jay said: “The sexual exploitation of children by networks is not a rare phenomenon confined to a small number of areas with high-profile criminal cases.”

The report did not assess whether ethnicity was a factor in grooming gangs, arguing it was impossible to know as it criticised the “widespread failure” to record the ethnicity of victims and perpetrators.

The lack of accurate and reliable data from police forces and councils meant the “government and other organisations cannot know the current scale of child sexual exploitation by networks, or who is involved in these groups”, it said.

Information on race and ethnicity could help “prevention and detection” by police and play an “important role” in understanding the crimes and the context in which they occur, the report said, adding that it was unclear whether a “misplaced sense of political correctness or the sheer complexity of the problem” had inhibited data gathering.

It was clear from the evidence that none of the police forces or local authorities in the case study areas in this investigation had an accurate understanding of networks sexually exploiting children in their area

The inquiry highlighted how high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions had involved groups of men from ethnic minorities which had “led to polarised debate about whether there is any link between ethnicity and child sexual exploitation networks”.

Poor or non-existent data collection made it “impossible to know whether any particular ethnic group is over-represented as perpetrators of child sexual exploitation by networks”, the findings added.

The failure to collect data and say why it was important to do so had resulted in a “one-sided and often uninformed public debate” and allowing this to continue without “proper context” meant the discussion was both “unhelpful and divisive”, the findings added.

The inquiry based its probe on areas which had not already been the subject of other investigations (such as Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxford) in a bid to try and paint an “accurate” wider picture of the scale of the problem.

The findings instead detailed harrowing testimony from more than 30 young witnesses across six case study areas – Bristol, Durham, St Helens, Swansea, Tower Hamlets and Warwickshire.

The inquiry team said it “did not receive a reliable picture of child sexual exploitation” from these areas, with the data often “confused and confusing”.

There was evidence of child sexual exploitation by networks in all six areas, but that the relevant police forces were “generally not able to provide any evidence about these networks”, the inquiry said.

Two areas – Swansea and Tower Hamlets – said there was no data to suggest there had been any child exploitation by gangs, despite evidence to the contrary.

The report concluded: “It was clear from the evidence that none of the police forces or local authorities in the case study areas in this investigation had an accurate understanding of networks sexually exploiting children in their area.”

It added: “The focus should be on investigating the criminal conduct of sexual exploitation, not sanctioning children for what is frequently low-level antisocial behaviour.”

Council leaders and police chiefs must take charge on “eradicating attitudes and behaviours which suggest that children who are victims of exploitation are in some way responsible for it”, the 185-page report said.

It made six recommendations in response to its findings on grooming gangs, including calling on the Department for Education to ban “without delay” placing 16-year-old and 17-year-old children in semi-independent or independent care if they are a sexual exploitation victim or are at a “heightened risk” of becoming one.

Police forces and local authorities should also be required to collect data on all cases of known or suspected child sexual exploitation, including by criminal gangs and the ethnicity of the victims and perpetrators, the inquiry said.