Rotherham abuse whistleblower: "Chances missed to act sooner"

But Adele Gladman (pictured) hit out at Ministers, saying: “It was clear there were things that should have been investigated.”

Ms Gladman, who worked as a researcher in Rotherham between 2001 and 2002, told a parliamentary committee in 2014 that her findings had been suppressed and she had been bullied by council officials.

And this week an internal review of the Home Office found the government department had been sent several documents pointing to sexual exploitation in the town between 1998 and 2005.

Among them was a draft report by Ms Gladman, sent to the Government in 2002, which referred to “men who are believed to be responsible for pimping and grooming young people into prostitution”.

This week, Ms Gladman said: “It is good to hear there’s no evidence of files being deliberately destroyed or lost and it upholds the evidence I gave to the home affairs committee.

“The negative is the number of opportunities that the Home Office had to make further inquiries.

“When you look at all these opportunities it becomes obvious that they should have taken some sort of action.

“It was clear there were things that should have been investigated.”

Ms Gladman pointed out that the Home Office had also been told of evidence of grooming and abuse by the charities CROP (the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping), which was also involved in the Rotherham research project, and Parents against Child Exploitation (PACE), as well as Keighley MP Ann Cryer, but still failed to act.

“When you put my evidence with their evidence, it takes a different tone,” she said.

“It could have been raised with the chief constable or chief executive. Why they did not do that I cannot speculate.”

Ms Gladman also dismissed claims she could have been misunderstood when she tried to lift the lid on how she had been treated in Rotherham.

The review report said the then-researcher and a Home Office official had “very different interpretations” of a phone call, adding: “The researcher thought she was calling to ‘whistleblow’ or report malpractice, while the official receiving the call interpreted it as one to explain a delay to the research timetable.”

Ms Gladman said this week: “I have a clear recollection of the call and a note of it and cannot see how it could be interpreted that way.

“I was telling her research had been removed, how I was being put under pressure to paint Rotherham in a better light and how I had faced disciplinary proceedings and she said they were right behind me.”

She said her findings and the difficulties she was having in doing her job “should have rung some alarm bells”.

Ms Gladman added: “It is nice when a report corroborates what you said all along and that’s probably the best that could have been hoped for.

“This report confirms the Home Office knew about it, not just from me but from several different sources.”