“In the light of this report, it is appropriate that South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner Shaun Wright should step down.”

Mr Wright said he had already taken responsibility for the scandal once before when he resigned from the council in 2010 when the extent of child sex exploitation in Rotherham was first revealed.

He said: “Clearly I’m very sorry for any abuse that took place – if I could have prevented it I would. Any right-minded human being would want to protect vulnerable children, of that I am convinced.

“All I can say is that this is a top priority for South Yorkshire Police and it will remain a top priority for South Yorkshire Police for as long as I am in this role.”

He added: “I take my share of the responsibility, there was systemic failure and I only wish that I knew more at the time – if I knew then what I know now then clearly more could have been done.

“I think I took appropriate actions where that was available. I do have regrets that perhaps I was not more aware of the issue at the time where I could have perhaps influenced services better.

“But in the end I regret my role in that systemic failure and I have taken responsibility for that.”

^{Professor Alexis Jay (PA)}

Mr Wright also said abuse report author Professor Alexis Jay should have gone further and “named names” in terms of council officials, politicians and police officers who had failed to protect youngsters from abuse.

Mr Wright said issues identified in the report regarding culture and ethnicity had come as a “huge surprise” to him because he had not been made aware of the problems at the time.

He told Sky News: “What Prof Jay has painted a picture of is really an industrial scale of child abuse that was taking place. To that extent I was simply not aware of the scale of the problem.

“Had I have been and I would have been aware of the issue then like I am today, then clearly much more action would and could have been taken.

“What this report demonstrates that lots of information was not escalated up to political level or indeed senior management level. For that I am hugely shocked and hugely sorry.”

Professor Jay’s report – commissioned by the council – said failures of the political and officer leadership of Rotherham Council between 1997 and 2009 were “blatant” as the seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers and was not seen as a priority by South Yorkshire Police.

^{Rotherham Council leader Roger Stone (PA)}

Rotherham Council leader Roger Stone resigned following its publication and there were calls for Mr Wright to follow suit.

The report, which looked at a period between 1997 and 2013, detailed “utterly appalling” examples of “children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally-violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone”.

Professor Jay said the children as young as 11 were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in northern England, abducted, beaten and intimidated.

^{Clockwise from top left: Umar Razaq , Razwan Razaq, Mohsin Khan, Adil Hussain and Zafran Ramzan (Ross Parry)}

The spotlight first fell on Rotherham in 2010 when five men were given lengthy jail terms after they were found guilty of grooming teenage girls for sex.

Umar Razaq, 24, Razwan Razaq, 30, Zafran Ramzan, 21, Adil Hussain 20, and Mohsin Khan, 21, were found guilty at Sheffield Crown Court of a string of sexually related offences against girls aged between 12 and 16, including rape. Their sentences totalled more than 32 years.