The Casey Report Crunching the Numbers: Data, Discrepancies and Dangers

On Monday 16th June 2025, Baroness Casey of Blackstock DBE CB published her ‘National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse’. The report had been commissioned by the Government to review the national datasets relating to alleged Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) that had been collected by various agencies including the police, health services, and local authority children’s social care departments.

We have previously covered that analysis of the data revealed an inconsistency between the number of cases of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) recorded by local authority children’s social services  as opposed to police forces.

One of the findings of the report is that ‘police, local authority and health data is not shared effectively between agencies’, and that it is collected differently across different geographical boundaries, which makes it difficult to identify children who are presenting to different services which cover the same geographical area.

Police services usually span the largest geographical areas, and within them, there will be multiple local authorities, NHS Trusts and many schools. This can cause difficulties in ‘joining up the dots’, especially in CSE cases, when children may be known to many different institutions, a situation that often goes unnoticed due to lack of communication and shared data.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill 2024 will introduce ‘unique identifiers’ (‘UI’) for each child, a candidate for which is the child’s NHS Number. Every child is assigned a 10-digit number, either at birth, or when they first access NHS care.

Ensuring that each agency collects the child’s UI will theoretically make it more difficult for individual children to slip through the cracks where information is lost.

However, there are drawbacks to this. Unfortunately, if children perceive they are in trouble, they may not share their real name and/or UI.  How many adults, never mind children know their NHS number off hand? If the child gives a false name, this will mean that unless they are well known to a service and the worker already knows them by name and sight, the necessary correct data will not be recorded

There will also, of course, be the issue of parents who do not wish their children to be ‘tracked’ by the government, even if it can be argued it is for their own good. It is unclear how those parents will respond to this.  

Another issue is that information about children coming forward to places like sexual health clinics is kept safe by a veil of anonymity – they do not have to reveal that they have attended unless they want to. This encourages young people to attend particularly if they fear parental retaliation  as a result

From a public sector perspective, whilst every child already has a UI, currently, only the NHS has the capacity within its data systems to collect the NHS number for each encounter. It would therefore mean that all non-health authority institutions would need to update their data capture systems to ensure that the child’s NHS number is recorded on every encounter or has space to confirm that the NHS number is the same at every encounter.

Forbes comment:

Given the variations in the range of organisations and their geographical footprint, it is not particularly surprising that the data produced regarding CSE to date does not correlate. More effective data collection across entire geographical areas will make it much easier to determine which institutions a child is attending, and how often they are doing this. This will only work in the favour of children’s safety.

However, it remains to be seen what practical implementation of this strategy will look like with regards to data gathering, and how the British public will take to it. No system requiring human input will ever be foolproof but working towards a joined-up set of statistics is a laudable aim.

How it is to be achieved remains an open question.