The Dundee grooming gang case proves that Scotland is not immune to organised grooming gang sexual exploitation, but I agree that Police Scotland deserves real credit for bringing the perpetrators in Dundee, and in Glasgow’s beastie house case, to justice. To truly protect the vulnerable, however, we must detect the patterns of organised exploitation before the harm happens.

Police Scotland’s freedom of information response and the Government’s response to my recent written question expose fundamental gaps in our data systems. Police Scotland confirms that it has markers for exploitation but none for group or gang-based abuse. The interim vulnerable persons database has an at-risk marker for child sexual exploitation, but it cannot flag when that abuse is organised or networked. If we cannot even identify grooming gang patterns, how can we dismantle them? Will the Government now commit to an independent data collection audit as part of the work of a national task force, in order to close those dangerous data gaps?