Petition
You cannot fight what you refuse to count
A live Holyrood petition asks ministers to make Police Scotland record nationality, ethnicity, religion, asylum status and gang-based abuse, so group-based child sexual exploitation can be seen in the official record.
Joanna Kerr lodged PE2247 on 25 August. It is now under consideration by the Scottish Parliament, and it asks MSPs to urge the Scottish Government to require Police Scotland to collect data on nationality, religion, ethnicity, asylum status and gang-based abuse, meaning abuse involving two or more perpetrators. Kerr says that information “is not currently reliably collected or communicated,” and that without it “grooming gangs of predominantly Pakistani heritage (and others) are invisible in Scotland.” She also argues that the same records would help with other group-based child sexual abuse networks involved in trafficking.
None of this waits on Westminster. Policing and crime recording are Holyrood’s business, and ministers could require the fields to be filled in. So far they have not. Kerr has set out, in her own words, why she believes the records are needed now.
Joanna Kerr
“Grooming gangs exist in Scotland just as they do in England. These gangs have recently been confirmed to be organised crime gangs involved in drugs, trafficking and weapons, as well as illegitimate behaviour associated with children. They share similar political connections as to those in England, with these being primarily linked to the SNP party in Scotland, rather than Labour.”
“Asian crime gangs have been known about in Scotland since Operation Barber and Operation Gadher, dedicated anti-gang units under Strathclyde Police, the latter of which was shut down due to ‘political correctness’ reasons in 2003. This was unprecedented in Scottish policing history and widely objected to. Subsequent to this, we saw the racially motivated torture, murder and local trafficking of 15 year old Kriss Donald, by five Pakistani males, who were later quoted by a local in the southside as being known as the ‘Pakistani mafia’.”
“Since the death of Kriss Donald and the shut down of Operation Gadher, a step unprecedented in policing history given the intelligence associated with these gangs, Scotland has been silent on the issue of grooming and organised crime gangs of this description. These gangs have indeed proliferated since then. Police Scotland go further in that October 2025 they have in an FOI denied any knowledge or intelligence on these gangs as per the Casey (national audit on group based child sexual exploitation and abuse June 2025) profile. Further meetings as of current show that Police Scotland also refuse to follow Casey recommendations on data collection in relation to these gangs, a step which I believe will render these transnational, politically associated, Biradiri network linked gangs, as extremely visible in Scotland, and the threat that they are.”
“There is no reason to believe these Asian crime gangs are a different phenomenon from the grooming gangs now being profiled. When Operation Gadher was shut down, Strathclyde Police were already openly concerned about how far those gangs had spread and how deeply they had taken hold.”
“This petition aims to force Police Scotland to record and communicate data, and engage itself in routine and standard data collection needed to assess risk, profile and prosecute in order to protect Scottish children. These actions are required urgently.”
Thomas Kerr MSP
Reform UK’s deputy leader in Scotland, Thomas Kerr (no relation to Joanna Kerr), the MSP for Glasgow, has given the petition his support. In June he asked ministers for an update on the promised public inquiry into group-based child sexual abuse and exploitation, “commonly referred to as grooming gangs or rape gangs,” and whether it would look at failures by the authorities. PE2247 takes that concern into the crime records. If the inquiry cannot see who the accused are, it will struggle to tell the public what happened.
What PE2247 asks for
PE2247 asks Police Scotland to collect, and collect reliably, five things: nationality, religion, ethnicity, asylum status, and a flag when abuse involves two or more perpetrators. On 8 September the official petitions site showed more than 1,400 signatures. Names can still be added until the petition is closed.
Kerr has been here before. Her earlier petition, PE2208, asked for a statutory duty on public bodies to collect and publish the nationality, ethnicity, immigration status and religion of child sexual offenders. The Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee closed it on 11 March 2026. According to the PE2247 background, the committee was told that Police Scotland was working to align its systems so that nationality could be captured, that a national child sexual abuse and exploitation strategic group was looking at data collection, and that the Scottish Government had committed to a public inquiry into Scotland’s response to group-led abuse.
The same background records what Police Scotland was not offering. It intended to capture nationality, but not religion, ethnicity or asylum status, and it was not intending to flag gang-based abuse. Kerr says the force later told her it may take up to three years before it even gathers nationality data. That is a long time to leave the same gap open.
Police Scotland’s own numbers
Police Scotland has already set the problem out in its own Freedom of Information replies.
FOI 25-1494, answered on 10 June 2025, confirmed that the national crime system rolled out in January 2024 has fields for the ethnicity and nationality of a suspect or accused person. There are no fields for immigration or asylum status. Officers can put that information in free text “where relevant,” which is of little use if anyone later wants to search, compare or publish it.
The same reply said the new fields are not mandatory, and that experience had already shown they were left blank in more than half of crime reports. Police Scotland could not automatically extract accused people by nationality. Doing it properly, it said, would mean reading crime reports one by one and would cost more than the £600 FOI limit. Arrest totals could not be compiled either, because some people are de-arrested before they reach a station and their details never enter the custody system. Conviction data is not held by the force at all.
A follow-up, FOI 25-1795, answered on 6 January 2026, put figures on the gap for Group 2 sexual crimes, the official crime group covering sexual offences, from 1 January 2024 to 31 May 2025. These are not grooming-gang statistics. Police Scotland marked them as provisional and experimental. They still show how often the boxes that already exist are left empty.
| What was recorded | Share of 10,011 accused |
|---|---|
| Ethnicity entered | 60.1% |
| Nationality entered | 57.6% |
| Both ethnicity and nationality | 40.2% |
| Detected sexual crimes where every accused has both fields | 37.7% |
In the nationality table for those same sexual-crime accused, the largest entry is “Not Recorded / Not Known”: 5,440 of 10,011. For ethnicity, “Not recorded” is the largest line as well, at 3,998. The force cannot, on this evidence, give the public a confident picture of who has been detected for sexual crime in Scotland.
The tables cover sexual crime as a whole and should be read that way. Even so, they are the clearest published test of whether Police Scotland fills the boxes it already has, and too often it does not. Asking for religion, asylum status and a gang-abuse flag as well is what PE2208 was closed for supposedly being in hand.
Councillor Audrey Dempsey
Audrey Dempsey, the Reform UK councillor for Springburn and Robroyston on Glasgow City Council, has recorded her support as well. She wants Holyrood to require Police Scotland to record who is committing the abuse, including when it is carried out by a group.
The inquiry still needs the records
Ministers have announced a statutory public inquiry into group-based child sexual abuse and exploitation, to be chaired by Professor Alexis Jay. That announcement was one of the reasons PE2208 was closed. A letter to the Criminal Justice Committee on 3 September said the terms of reference were still being drafted, with a fuller update promised to Parliament in the autumn.
Reform UK’s Holyrood manifesto says: “We will ensure the independence of the grooming gangs inquiry in Scotland.” Independence will not be enough if Police Scotland still has no asylum field, will not flag abuse by two or more perpetrators, and leaves nationality blank for thousands of people accused of sexual crime. The inquiry will be asked to describe a pattern the official statistics have been allowed to leave incomplete.
England has already had this argument. Baroness Casey’s audit, which Joanna Kerr cited in her first petition, found that weak recording stopped accurate profiling of group-based offenders. A new computer system in 2024 does not close the point if officers are free to leave the fields empty.
The same chapter of the Scottish manifesto also pledges to abolish the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, abolish the Scottish Sentencing Council, impose high sentences for repeat offenders, increase prison capacity and end the SNP’s early release policy. Those are Holyrood decisions. They do not replace the need to count the offenders. Westminster papers on foreign national offenders, Channel crossings or Indefinite Leave to Remain belong to another parliament. PE2247 is about what Police Scotland writes down now.
Add your name
The petition is open and under consideration. Police Scotland has already said the nationality and ethnicity boxes are optional, that there is no asylum field, and that pulling nationality from the files would take a manual trawl it will not pay for. There is no need for another working group to explain why those records should be mandatory.
If you think Scotland should know who is targeting its children, add your name.
Scottish Parliament petition PE2247
The petition is open. You can still add your name.
If you want Police Scotland to record nationality, ethnicity, religion, asylum status and gang-based abuse, Joanna Kerr’s petition is the place to say so.
