India, June 15 -- British prime minister Keir Starmer said on Saturday that he would accept a recommendation for a national inquiry into "grooming gangs" after a decade-old child sexual abuse scandal came to light recently.

Starmer had earlier resisted calls for a statutory review in the case. Earlier this year it was revealed that gangs of mostly Pakistani men had groomed, trafficked and raped young white girls more than a decade ago.

UK's interior minister Yvette Cooper in January asked Louise Casey, a former senior official, to undertake a "rapid audit" of the current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation in Britain.

"(Casey's) position when she started the audit was that there was not a real need for a national inquiry, over ...