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Notes -
Alongside what everyone else has said about how you can reasonably arrive at this figure, I also want to point out that there's nothing unusual about this figure in the historiography of atrocities. Extrapolating from Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale etc is crude, but it's the same starting point that similar studies of covered-up atrocities had to work with. Demanding perfect precision at the outset, in a context where authorities are suppressing data, would mean never recognizing most historical atrocities.
To the extent the report makes a mistake, it's mistake is not showing it's calculations in greater detail and not giving a range. But most historians aren't statisticians and many quoted ranges are taken from taking the credible lower-bound figure given by one historian against the credible higher-bound figure given by another, not some statistical analysis of uncertainty.
There are to my knowledge only two serious pieces of scholarly work on the subject of Grooming Gangs. Peter McLoughlin's Easy Meat, and Rupert Lowe's report. To get anywhere into the ballpark at this early a stage is more than you could expect. To contrast with a work that was at a similarly early stage of Scholarship, consider Mark Twain's far more bombastic claim about the Congo Free State's atrocities from King Leopold's Soliloquy:
More recent scholarship leans towards 1.5 million, though given the poor record keeping a higher figure closer to Twain's claim cannot be ruled out.
As for the argument that Lowe is biased. Yes. He is. As was Mark Twain. You can contrast his bias against the bias of British Institutions, which until recently would have put the number of victims of "Pakistani Grooming Gangs" as 0 by denying the very concept.
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