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By Liz Bates, political correspondent, and Sam Coates, deputy political editor

Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.

Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.

In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a "total cover-up".

The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.

In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper's then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.

The council went to Lord Gove's Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove's office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.

Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings' account.

Watch the full report here:

The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times' publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.

A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.

One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.

There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.

Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.

The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.

The home secretary turns to "evidence of rape and sexual exploitation taking place in street gangs and drug gangs, combining criminal and sexual exploitation".

She also discusses the modern forms of grooming and sexual exploitation that starts online, pointing to "the use of social media apps to build up relationships and lure children into physical abuse".

The government is already "passing world-leading new laws to target those who groom and exploit children online and investing in cutting edge technology to target the highest-harm offenders", Yvette Cooper says.

"But we will need to do more," she says.

Finally, the home secretary notes that former home secretary Grant Shapps apologised in 2022 to victims of child sexual abuse, and that she joined him in that at the time.

She reiterates it now.

"To the victims and survivors of sexual exploitation and grooming gangs, on behalf of this and past governments and the many public authorities who let you down, I want to reiterate an unequivocal apology for the unimaginable pain and suffering you have suffered and the failure of our country's institutions through decades to prevent that harm and keep you safe," Cooper says.

She promises action from the government, and calls for everyone to work together to "keep our children safe".

Next, the home secretary turns to the rapid review that has just been conducted by Baroness Louise Casey. She examined "the nature, scale and characteristics of gang-based exploitation".

In particular, Baroness Casey was asked to look at "the issue of ethnicity, and the cultural and societal drivers for this type of offending", which had never before been done.

Yvette Cooper described the report's findings as "damning", identifying a "deep-rooted failure to treat children as children", as well as a "continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation, and serious violence".

The response from the authorities was "fragmented", with "too little sharing of information", a reliance on "flawed data", as well as "too much denial, too little justice and too many victims still being let down".

The review describes how perpetrators walked free because "no one joined the dots", or the law protected them rather than the victims, information was not shared between local services, and organisations "looked the other way".

Cooper tells MPs: "Baroness Casey found 'blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions' all played a part in this collective failure."

There was also a "failure to gather proper robust national data" on ethnicity, and the report finds "clear evidence of over representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men".

Casey refers to "examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions".

Cooper goes on to say that "many of these findings are not new", but "too little has changed".

"We have lost more than a decade. That must end now," Cooper says.

The home secretary opens her statement by paying tribute to "the incredible bravery of the women who told their stories and have fought for justice through all those years".

"They should never have been let down for so long," Yvette Cooper declares.

She recounts how children as young as 10 were "plied with drugs and alcohol, brutally raped by gangs of men and disgracefully let down again and again by the authorities who were meant to protect them and keep them safe".

She tells MPs that arrests and convictions have accelerated in recent months, and over 800 cases will undergo a "formal review" - a number she expects to rise.

Cooper goes on to say that "rapid action" is under way to implement the recommendations of past reviews that have "for too long sat on the shelf", and in pending legislation, they will introduce:

• Mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse;
• New aggravated offences for grooming offenders.

The home secretary is on her feet in the House of Commons setting out the recommendations of a government-requested audit into the scale of grooming gangs across the country.

Yvette Cooper is expected to set out a number of immediate policy decisions from the government as a result of the review, and she will also announce a full statutory public inquiry.

Watch live on Sky News, in the stream above (refresh the page if you can't see it), and follow live updates here in the Politics Hub.

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Sky News' Sam Coates and Politico's Anne McElvoy serve up their essential guide to the day in British politics.

The prime minister is in Canada at the G7 as conflict escalates in the Middle East. Can Sir Keir Starmer contain any further flare-ups between Donald Trump and other allies and attempt to bring some calm to the region?

The prime minister is also set to authorise a national inquiry into grooming gangs, six months after he said people calling for one were "jumping on the bandwagon".

It comes after a national inquiry was recommended by Baroness Louise Casey in her 200-page report, which is due to be published today. How will Starmer respond to the rapid review?

The government is planning for "a variety of developments" as other countries stepped up efforts to bring back citizens stranded in Israel.

The Foreign Office has advised against all travel to Israel, but Britons already in the country now face difficulties getting home 鈥� with the airspace closed due to the conflict with Iran.

A Number 10 spokesman said: "We, of course, recognise this is a fast-moving situation that has the potential to deteriorate further, quickly and without warning.

"We are keeping all our advice under constant review and we plan for a variety of developments, as you would expect."

Poland has announced an evacuation of around 200 of its citizens in a bus convoy to Jordan, while the Czech Republic and Slovakian governments have organised repatriation flights from the region.

Iran fired further missiles at Israel overnight, while Israel's military claimed to have "full air superiority" over Tehran as strikes continued.

The escalating conflict will be high on the agenda as leaders from the G7 group of wealthy democracies meet in Canada.

Sir Keir Starmer said that the G7 meeting in Alberta would provide an opportunity for allies to make the case for de-escalation in the 鈥渇ast-moving鈥� situation in the Middle East, with US president Donald Trump among those set to attend.

Starmer called for "restraint and de-escalation" during a bilateral meeting with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni in Kananaskis, Canada, on Sunday evening.

Back in 2015, Baroness Louise Casey was asked by the Conservative government to go to Rotherham to look into the grooming scandal - and ask how those in authority could have prevented it.

What she found caused shock waves through the local area and in Westminster. 

She identified widespread failures that started with the police and ran through child protection right to the top of the council.    

Baroness Casey exposed rotten cultures which saw white working class girls as not worthy of protection, reported vile misogynistic language that was used about them, and laid bare the institutional fear about acknowledging the race of the perpetrators.

She didn't hold back and her report laid the groundwork for a decade of some limited improvements. 

But ten years later, she's returned to the subject because not enough has been done and will this time will order a national inquiry.  

At the heart of this is a deep political irony, that the Conservatives, whose successive governments failed to order this inquiry or follow through on their many promises to victims, will now absolve themselves of responsibility. 

Instead the anger falls on Labour who have spent their first year in government scrambling to get a grip of the issue, initially saying a national inquiry wasn鈥檛 necessary and therefore opening the door for pressure to build. 

Their conclusions today will be welcomed by many but they may struggle to shake the accusation that they didn鈥檛 act quickly enough. 

The woman who has spent a decade pushing those in power to act, will hope she won't have return ten years from now to say it all again. 

The government has announced plans to invest what it says is a record 拢7.9bn in flood defences over the next 10 years.

The Environment Department (Defra) said the money will be spent on rolling out high-performance flood barriers as well as nature-based solutions such as wetland restoration.

Climate change is increasing the risk and frequency of flooding in the UK, with the Environment Agency saying one in four properties in England will be in areas at risk of flooding from rivers, the sea or surface water by mid-century.

It comes ahead of the government's expected unveiling of its infrastructure strategy 鈥� a long-term plan to invest in and deliver major infrastructure over the next 10 years.

The aim of the flooding programme is to protect hundreds of thousands of homes, businesses and vital infrastructure as the flood risk intensifies, save public services money and support economic growth.

Defra said every 拢1 spent on flood defences is expected to prevent around 拢8 in economic damage.