PAKISTANI RAPE GANG PROTECTING OLDHAM COUNCIL HANDED A TAXI LICENCE TO A MAN CONVICTED OF ABDUCTING AND SEXUALLY ASSAULTING A 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL IN HIS CAR. In September 2014, under Labour leader Jim McMahon, the council’s head of licensing reported five convicted drivers to the Labour cabinet member responsible. Four of them were left on the road. One of those four went on to sexually assault a child in his taxi. The records of who made that decision no longer exist. Andy Burnham's review recorded every part of this. It named none of the people responsible before clearing the council of wrongdoing. OLDHAM COUNCIL LICENSED A CONVICTED CHILD SEX OFFENDER In 2001 a man was convicted of indecently assaulting and abducting a 13-year-old girl in his private hire car. He served 18 months in prison. In 2005 Oldham Council handed him a taxi licence. The council let him drive the public, children included, for ten years before it revoked his licence in January 2015. It licensed another man in 2003, two years after he was convicted of indecent assault. In September 2014 the council's head of licensing reported five licensed drivers to the Labour cabinet member responsible. The report set out their previous convictions, including sexual offences. After a screening exercise with Greater Manchester Police and the safeguarding board, one man was sent to a licensing panel and lost his licence. The other four kept driving. The next year one of those four men sexually assaulted a child in his taxi. When he was convicted in 2017, the judge asked why he had ever been given a licence. When Burnham's reviewers went looking for the records of who decided to keep those men driving, the records had gone. THE COUNCIL KNEW TAXIS WERE MOVING SEXUALLY EXPLOITED CHILDREN AROUND OLDHAM Oldham's social workers knew it by 2010. Staff in the council's own children's homes were writing down the registration numbers of the cars collecting girls. Council officers were warning taxi firms to stop carrying children in care. Girls were coming back to council children's homes in taxis they had no means of paying for. The council's own investigators suspected the girls were being sexually exploited to pay for those journeys. These were children in the council's care. One licensed driver admitted meeting an underage girl in an illegal shisha bar and using his taxi for sexual activity with her. A safeguarding officer told the council he was not fit to hold a licence. The council had his own admission in its files. The authorities understood the danger. They had the registration numbers, the girls' names and a driver's own admission. They had the power to take every one of those men off the road, yet the men kept driving. BURNHAM'S REVIEW NEVER NAMED WHO DID IT The law says a council cannot grant a taxi licence to anyone unless it is satisfied they are a fit and proper person. Oldham had the power to refuse every one of those men. It chose to license them. Burnham's reviewers had the council's licensing files. They could have named the councillors who sat on the panels that licensed those men in 2003 and 2005. They could have named the Labour cabinet member who received the 2014 report, established who decided that four convicted drivers could stay on the road and made every one of them answer for it in public. They did none of it. Whatever those people told the reviewers, the public was never told. Instead the reviewers blamed the national guidance of the time. No guidance has ever forced a council to hand a convicted child sex offender a licence to drive children around its town. They found a driver questioned over two separate sexual assaults on young female passengers, where police had told the licensing panel there was enough evidence to prosecute him for the first. The panel let him keep his licence. The reviewers themselves said it should have been revoked. They were told that drivers from one Oldham taxi firm had been exploiting children at the old Conservative Club. Greater Manchester Police, the force Burnham was responsible for, investigated itself and found nothing. The reviewers admitted they could not check the police's work, yet accepted the police's word. Then they wrote that only a small number of drivers were involved. They wrote that there was no evidence senior managers or councillors had covered up the exploitation of children by taxi drivers. Oldham Council had licensed child sex offenders and kept them driving with their convictions in front of it. It had lost the records of who made that decision. Burnham's review cleared it. THE TAXI TRADE HOLDS POWER IN OLDHAM Oldham's taxi trade is organised, and the council bends to it. The council's own equality assessment says large numbers of the town's Pakistani and Bangladeshi residents work in the trade. In 2021 the drivers' associations fought the council over the licence plates on the front of their cars. The council reinstated the plates, but the trade kept pushing. In June 2023, weeks after we removed Amanda Chadderton, Arooj Shah was back as Labour leader of Oldham Council. Her licensing committee rewrote the taxi policy following consultation with the trade. It took the identification plates off the front of every licensed vehicle and shrank the operator signs on the doors. The GMB union, which had campaigned for the change with the drivers, publicly thanked Shah for it. The same changes drew drivers licensed in Merseyside and the Midlands back onto Oldham licences, taking Oldham from 1,300 licensed drivers in April 2023 to 2,000 a year later. By 2025 its licensed fleet had more than doubled, to 2,397 vehicles. The chair of the council's licensing committee describes the council's job as working to grow the taxi trade. This is the town where children's home staff once had to write down taxi registrations to keep track of the cars taking girls away. Oldham Council took the plates off the front of its taxis, then licensed more of them than ever. WHY BOTH REFORM AND THE CONSERVATIVES MUST DEMAND THE LAW IS CHANGED Andy Burnham commissioned the review that cleared Oldham’s taxi licensing. As Prime Minister he leads the government that can make cameras compulsory in every taxi and private hire vehicle in England. He has not done it, and Labour will not do it while he leads them. There are too many Pakistani votes at stake. Neither the Conservatives or Reform are held to ransom this way. Rotherham put a camera in every licensed taxi once its own drivers were exposed abusing children. Only 9% of licensing authorities in England have done the same. In most of this country a child can still be put in the back of a licensed car with nothing recording what is done to her. Reform and the Conservatives say they stand with the victims of the rape gangs. Here is the test. Every council they run has the power to make a camera a condition of every taxi licence it issues, and none of them needs Burnham’s permission to use it. We demand they use it, in every one of those councils. Reform won 13 of the 20 seats contested in Oldham in May 2026. Its councillors can table the motion that makes cameras compulsory in every Oldham taxi. They can also force the council to publish the names of the councillors who licensed those men, and the cabinet member and officers who read the 2014 report and left four convicted drivers on the road. If Reform will not do it in the town where this happened, it will not do it anywhere. In Parliament we demand Reform and Conservative MPs force the vote Burnham will not hold. They must put down the amendment that makes cameras compulsory in every licensed taxi in England, with a deadline every council has to meet. It must also turn the ban on licensing child sex offenders from guidance into law. Oldham had that guidance and licensed them anyway. The National Inquiry must put every person who licensed those men and kept them driving under oath. It must ask how Oldham’s taxi trade came to hold that much power over the council that licenses it. The girls being driven back to Oldham’s children’s homes in taxis they could not pay for were the council’s own responsibility. The council licensed the cars, and it licensed the men driving them. Raja Miah MBE _________ You know what we are up against. The mainstream media will not touch my work. Institutions I investigate do not volunteer their records. Politicians do not suddenly decide to hold themselves to account. And yet, despite every attempt to stop us, we forced the national inquiry. We did that because enough ordinary people refused to go away. But getting the inquiry was never the end of this campaign. In many ways it was only the beginning. Now we have to watch where it goes, what it investigates, which places it avoids, which witnesses it calls, which records it obtains and whether the same institutions that failed these children are allowed to control the story again. Nobody else is going to do that work for us. And I cannot do it indefinitely working on my own. That is why I keep talking about 50,000 committed subscribers. It is not a vanity number. I did not pluck it out of the air. With fifty thousand people with me means when we uncover something important, it does not depend on a newspaper editor, a television producer or an algorithm deciding whether you are allowed to see it. It gives us reach they cannot easily shut down. But there is another reason. I need to build a proper backroom operation around this work. At the moment I am investigating, researching, writing, publishing, producing the videos, running the newsletter, dealing with the technology and then starting again. It is unsustainable. I need people behind me who can take care of the technical and production work so that I can spend my time doing the thing I do best. That is why we have been pushing so hard for new paid subscribers. 🔴 SIGN UP HERE 👉 redwallandtherabble.co.uk If you read my work and want it to continue, I need your help. Sign up for free. There are no paywalls to access any of my work. If you can afford the £3 a month or £30 for the year, please become a paid subscriber. We forced the inquiry. Now we need the numbers to make sure they cannot control what happens next. Unfortunately, we are reaching the end of the road where I can continue working this way. The paid subscriptions have stalled. Worse, tens of thousands of people are now reading these articles without even joining the free mailing list. The audience is growing, but the number of people actually standing behind the work is not growing with it. Over a million people engaged in my content this weekend. 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