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Jennifer McKiernanPolitical reporter
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MPs are concerned councils were not told to keep relevant paperwork
Key documents for the grooming gangs inquiry may already have been lost due to Home Office errors, a Labour MP has told the BBC.
The independent inquiry into grooming gangs is about to begin its work after a long and acrimonious row about whether it was needed, what it should examine and who should chair it.
But Edinburgh East and Musselburgh MP Chris Murray, who is a member of the Home Affairs select committee, has raised concerns that councils have not been instructed to keep paperwork as they should have been.
He suggested the errors meant senior leadership teams were "not fit for purpose". The Home Office has been contacted for comment.
Baroness Anne Longfield, a former children's commissioner, will chair the inquiry into child sexual abuse by grooming gangs, which Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has promised will be a "moment of reckoning".
The inquiry will hold a series of targeted local investigations into the group-based child sexual exploitation of girls by grooming gangs, including in Oldham in Manchester, and these will be overseen by a national panel.
Investigators will "explicitly" consider the backgrounds of offenders, including their ethnicity and religion, Mahmood said, and "whether the authorities failed to properly investigate what happened out of a misplaced desire to protect community cohesion".
As a statutory inquiry, expected to last three years, investigators will have more powers than previous investigations - such as requiring people to testify and release other forms of evidence, and a budget of £65m.
Historic documents will form an important part of the investigation, so if any have been destroyed this could hamper trails of evidence.
Murray told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the errors were "inexplicable" as formal letters instructing councils to start preparing to hand over evidence "should have happened quite automatically".
"All indications were that this happened, but it did not, and that is inexplicable", he said.
Asked whether he believed documents had now been destroyed, Murray said: "That's a concern we have to have."
The Labour backbencher expressed anger that such a "routine task" could have slipped through the net and suggested senior leadership at the Home Office were to blame, particularly as they had already been warned about problems.
"It speaks about the wider processes of the Home Office, the culture, the process management, the ability of senior leadership to get a grip," he said, adding he was tired of "a kind of shrug of the shoulders and the phrase 'lessons will be learned'.".
"The government is trying to do some really significant reforms on home affairs and they will not be able to achieve it if the Home Office is not fit for purpose," he said.
One saving grace was that former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had instructed all police forces to "review all closed cases and all cases that had not been prosecuted" when Labour won power in July 2024, he added, "so hopefully that will have caught some of this up".
