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Theresa May has been urged to launch an inquiry into a town branded Britain’s child sex capital.

Tory MP Lucy Allan called for action after the Sunday Mirror revealed allegations that council leaders in her Telford constituency whitewashed their own report into gangs preying on youngsters.

The Prime Minister is also under pressure from backbenchers to set up an all party parliamentary committee to look at nationwide systematic failings to protect children from abusers.

Family rights campaigner Ms Allan made her demand to Mrs May for a Rotherham-style inquiry after we told how mums and dads in the Shropshire town had told the local authority they were passed from “pillar to post” over their fears.

(Image: Getty Images)

The Telford and Wrekin authority’s inquiry findings admitted parents thought police investigations were “slow” and social workers “dismissive”.

It also confessed it referred less than a third of 137 child sexual exploitation reports last year to its safeguarding team.

One victim branded the findings a “whitewash” after no-one was disciplined and the council claimed agencies were “working well together”.

The Sunday Mirror accompanied the woman, now in her 30s, to meet Ms Allan last week. She told her MP how police did nothing when they found her in a car with one perpetrator at a countryside spot.

(Image: PA)

She also said another abuser bought a second home with money he made selling her and other teenagers to pals and business associates. The victim said: “My classmates were going to the cinema, while I was being raped.”

She told Ms Allan the seven men of Asian origin jailed in 2012 after a child sex investigation in Telford were only “the tip of the iceberg” and added: “I still walk past some of the worst offenders on the street today.”

Ms Allan, 51, said she was “in awe” of the woman’s courage. “Victims are left feeling their voices are not being heard, and that no one is accountable for mistakes made,” she said. “I want those voices to be heard. Any council looking into its own processes is never going to be critical and that is never going to solve problems like this.

“If I was a victim and I felt my experiences had been covered up, I’d be very anxious. It is heaping injustice on injustice.”

(Image: Roland Leon / Sunday Mirror)

She said an independent inquiry into a town which has the highest rate of child sex crime in the country was “appropriate”. The abuse of teenagers by gangs of men in Telford, mainly from the Pakistani community, dates back two decades – and carries on despite even the best efforts of street pastors.

We told how police failed to log church volunteers accounts of suspected exploitation outside underage discos in the town on its central recording system after being handed files stretching to 150 pages.

In 2014, an independent report into a child sexual scandal in Rotherham, South Yorks, revealed 1,400 girls had been targeted by gangs over 14 years – and that authorities did little to address the grooming problem.

Government commissioners were forced to take over the council. Earlier this year, a key group of abusers were jailed for a total of 104 years.