McClean is an enigma.
I found not later statements by him, and all other police officers who have been quoted were clear that there was an issue and it was huge.
This is from Times 5th Jan.

Fourteen years ago, Detective Chief Superintendent Max McLean, who has
recently retired, led what seems likely to have been the first British police inquiry
involving the grooming and sexual exploitation of white girls by a gang of British
Pakistani men.
It began with a plea for help from a Leeds mother whose young daughter was
leaving via her bedroom window whenever she was summoned by the beeping
horn of a private-hire car that would stop outside their house in the early hours of
the morning.
The investigation led to 23 arrests and the exposure of a sex-trafficking ring
involving a network of private-hire taxi drivers and the sexual abuse of at least 20
girls. The victims had been groomed, held captive and some were driven as far as
Newcastle upon Tyne to be used for sex by older men.
In 1997, after the two ringleaders were jailed for kidnap, rape and assault, Mr
McLean warned that what police had uncovered was the tip of an iceberg. He
alerted forces across England to the possibility that similar networks were
operating in their communities.
Looking back now, his strongest memory is of the girls' extreme vulnerability and
of the pleasure that their abusers so clearly took in exercising power and control
over them. "The men held those young girls in extremely low esteem; they thought
that this somehow justified the violation that was taking place. As the years have
passed, the message should have gone out long ago that to ignore the scale and
nature of this problem is to bury your head in the sand."