A raft of new measures to tackle child sexual exploitation in Buckinghamshire has been given the green light by the cash-strapped county council.

Bucks County Council cabinet members backed the majority of recommendations made by a council scrutiny body at a meeting yesterday, after a lengthy review of practices across all organisations working with children and young people in Bucks.

Recommendations from the report, by the Children's Social Care and Learning Select Committee, included the development of a toolkit for use in schools to help schools foster resilience in children from an early age.

Lin Hazell, cabinet member for children’s services, said: “Cabinet was very happy to take on the recommendations in the Select Committee’s inquiry report.

“This was an important and wide-ranging review which will help combat the evil menace of child sexual exploitation.

“The safety of our children is paramount and we need to do as much as we possibly can to keep them away from the sexual predators who destroy young lives.

“Victims of child sexual exploitation just don’t see themselves as victims until much later in life, so we need to work on their behalf to keep child sexual exploitation at top of everyone’s agenda.”

The only one of the ten recommendations not to be given full backing by cabinet was that the council should commission a service to provide support to parents of victims.

Members were told that work goes on with families at present but it was not practical, particularly within the current budget difficulties, to commission a whole new service for this.

During the course of the CSE inquiry, scrutiny committee members heard from a spectrum of professionals engaged in the fight against exploitation and from those directly affected by CSE, including a parent of a victim and many victims themselves.

Leader Martin Tett stressed to cabinet that tackling child sexual exploitation was a top priority for the council.

He said: “I hear people say it doesn’t happen here – it happens everywhere, quite frankly. It has to remain one of our top priorities. It’s a blot and a shame on our country that this exploitation goes on.”

Scrutiny committee chairman Val Letheren told the cabinet this was one of the most difficult pieces of work she had done in her long career as a councillor and added: “We want to let the perpetrators know we are on to them.”

She related to cabinet members the compelling evidence that victims had given to the inquiry; and told how one child had said she had been leaving school at lunchtime to be sexually exploited, before going back to school for the afternoon.

After the meeting, she said: “We are assured by cabinet’s formal backing of our recommendations that the council considers child sexual exploitation to be a top priority, and I was particularly pleased to see that three of the recommendations we made in the report had already been implemented before the cabinet meeting.”