Home Office bureaucrats have been accused of burying a report on the ethnic background of grooming gang rapists announced in 2018.

The report was commissioned by Sajid Javid — then Home Secretary, now Chancellor of the Exchequer — in 2018, with the Pakistani-heritage Muslim MP saying it made him “feel angry” that such a disproportionate number of grooming gang rapists came from his community, and that they had “disgraced our heritage”.

The Home Office later said the review would remain internal, however, supposedly due to operational sensitivity, and Javid was accused of having essentially shelved it.

Now his successor as Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is reportedly being met with “obfuscation” and “given the run around” by departmental bureaucrats as she attempts to find out what has become of their investigation.

Police Knew About Rotherham ‘Asian’ Rape Gangs But Ignored Them over Fears of ‘Racial Tensions’: Report https://t.co/WWDiOm3r3R — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 19, 2020

“I have no idea why, but it has consistently felt like Home Office officials deliberately avoid ministers clear instructions for research when it comes to grooming gangs,” commented Sarah Champion, a Labour MP who has pressed the issue of grooming gangs for some time, and was sacked from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow government for daring to say that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.”

“The Home Office ministers and the former Home Secretary [Javid] have all stated to me that the department will carry out research into perpetrators of gang-related child sexual exploitation,” Champion said of the current impasse.

“Still we have nothing. It appears civil servants in the Home Office believe if they ignore requests into grooming gang data for long enough, ministers will just move on to a different topic.

“I think they might be shocked by the persistence of Priti Patel on this issue.”

Sources told the Huffington Post that Patel was “not best pleased” with officials in her department, who are seen as “not being completely upfront” about the issue. She is said to be insistent on seeing the results of the report for herself, even if they are not revealed to the public.

Independent research by think tank Quilliam has previously indicated that some 84 per cent of groomers are South Asian origin men.

A report by think tank Quilliam has found that more than eight out of ten men convicted of grooming gang offences have an 'Asian' background, while victims are "almost exclusively white girls". https://t.co/WMYGngGPDf — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 10, 2017

“We were promised a review of sorts by the then home secretary and then when it didn’t surface, we were told it was for internal use only,” commented Nazir Afzal, a former Crown prosecutor who led some of the early cases against grooming gang when the authorities were finally forced to act on the scandal.

“Now it seems nobody can find it, he added.

“It’s victims that constantly get let down by the failures of those in authority.”

Afzal wants the report released because, in his view, its absence is being “exploited by the far right”.

Because of his background and work on grooming gang cases, Afzal is often wheeled out by the mainstream media outlets who neglected the issue for years as an authoritative voice ont the subject — but he has previously tried to play down the religious and ethnic dimensions of the large-scale sexual exploitation of overwhelmingly non-Muslim, usually white girls by overwhelmingly Mulsim, usually Pakistani-origin men as non-existent or minimal.

In 2014 he suggested that while the ethnic profile of victims and perpetrators “is what it is”, Asian-origin men were vastly overrepresented in the offender statistics in large part because “Pakistani men, Asian men, [are] disproportionately employed in the night-time economy” — cab drivers, takeaway owners and workers, and so on — and that brings vulnerable seeking “transport” and “food” in contact with the “very small minority” of night-time economy workers inclined towards sexual abuse.

“There is no religious basis for this. These men were not religious,” Afzal insisted — but victims vehemently disagree.

'As a Rotherham grooming gang survivor, I want people to know about the religious extremism which motivated my abusers. The men who raped me weren't like paedophiles – they were like terrorists' https://t.co/d0c3OccLO5 — The Independent (@Independent) March 18, 2018

Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery