More than 200 Mohamed Al Fayed survivors will meet Keir Starmer today. Some are already tempering their expectations

They have waited years for this meeting. Some of them are not sure it will be enough.

More than 200 alleged survivors of sexual abuse by the late Mohamed Al Fayed, the Egyptian-born billionaire who owned Harrods from 1985 until 2010, gathered virtually on June 3 to meet UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. The Survivors Trust, a rape and sexual abuse services provider, chaired the meeting alongside the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Survivors of Mohamed Al Fayed and Harrods. The Survivors Trust says the meeting marks the first time a sitting prime minister has engaged directly with survivors connected to a single institution.

Sarah Spong, an American survivor from South Carolina who has been among the most publicly visible advocates for a statutory public inquiry into Al Fayed's abuse and the institutions that enabled it, framed the significance carefully before the meeting took place. "Sex abuse survivors had always been the victims of the whims of politicians," she said. The meeting, she added, was better than silence, but a meeting was not a statutory inquiry.

That distinction matters. The investigation into Al Fayed's conduct and those who may have enabled it has grown substantially since his death in August 2023 at 94, having never been charged with any offence. By March 2026, the Metropolitan Police investigation had grown to 154 complainants, with allegations spanning rape, sexual assault, sexual exploitation and human trafficking. Four suspects, believed to be individuals from Al Fayed's network at Harrods and elsewhere, have been interviewed under caution for aiding and abetting rape and assisting the commission of sexual offences.

The overall scale of the allegations is larger still. More than 400 complaints of sexual misconduct against Al Fayed have been made to date, dating back to 1977 and spanning a period that extends to 2014. Twenty-one women came forward to the Metropolitan Police while Al Fayed was still alive. He was never charged.

That failure of the police to act while Al Fayed was living now has formal consequences. The Independent Office for Police Conduct launched a probe last month into five current and former Metropolitan Police officers for potential misconduct related to the handling of allegations against the former Harrods owner. The IOPC has said it has yet to determine whether any of the officers faces a disciplinary case.

The data failures have been damaging in their own right. Joanna Brittan, a Devon-based survivor who waived her automatic lifelong right to anonymity to speak publicly, discovered that the Metropolitan Police had sent handwritten notes of her account, along with her address, contact number and date of birth, to another alleged victim in Australia in error. The breach was reported to the Information Commissioner's Office. A one-off payment was offered to Brittan. She described the Met as "shambolic, incompetent and complicit."

The meeting with Starmer carries its own complicated context. In 2009, the Crown Prosecution Service, then led by Starmer, elected not to prosecute Al Fayed following claims he had sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl in Harrods. Starmer has not publicly addressed that decision in the context of the current inquiry.

Survivor groups are clear about what they want. The Survivors Trust is calling the meeting a turning point, but stressed it should be the beginning of sustained government engagement rather than an end point. The APPG is calling for a full understanding of the systemic failures surrounding Harrods and action to prevent further abuse. Justice for Harrods Survivors has said it has credible evidence that the abuse was not limited to Al Fayed himself, pointing to the network of enablers now under investigation.

Harrods is separately seeking court-appointed oversight of Al Fayed's estate, citing solvency fears and concerns that victims may not be compensated through the existing redress scheme. The scheme was set up by Harrods after the scale of the allegations became public, with the store praising what it described as the bravery of all survivors in coming forward.

Lucy Duckworth, policy lead for the Survivors Trust, who chaired the June 3 meeting, framed what survivors need from this moment. "This must be a turning point," she said. "We need to confront ourselves and policymakers with the wider systemic failures that allowed abuse on this scale to occur and persist."