Dismissing this report as a political vehicle overlooks the distinct operational expertise of the inquiry team.
The report was co-authored by former police detective, Peter Downes, alongside a highly qualified legal team. You're analysing it as if it were a standard academic or civil service audit, but that completely misses the point of why independent inquiries are established in the first place.
For decades, official bodies (with all their 'perfectly defined terms of reference') wilfully ignored, downplayed, or classified child sexual exploitation as a localised or multi-ethnic issue to protect community relations and institutional reputations.
When statutory services fail to track or map a crime properly, an independent review has to cast a wider net. They rely heavily on self-selected survivor testimonies, whistle-blower accounts, and advocacy data because the state's own official data is notoriously incomplete, sanitised, or heavily gatekept.
The fact that you disagree with specific data points, theological arguments, or recommendations doesn't invalidate the report's credibility. What Peter Downes and the inquiry have done is use their professional investigative backgrounds to bypass bureaucratic gatekeeping, mapping a systemic pattern of exploitation across 85 local authorities that official institutions spent years trying to suppress.
If the establishment's traditional auditing methods actually worked, an independent report like this wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.