The New Zealand High Court judge appointed to head Britain's long-delayed inquiry into child sex abuse is to be grilled by MPs at Westminster.

Justice Lowell Goddard was named as inquiry chairwoman by Home Secretary Theresa May last week.

She is the third individual proposed to take charge of the inquiry, after Baroness Butler-Sloss and Dame Fiona Woolf both stood aside amid concerns over their establishment links.

Justice Goddard, who oversaw an inquiry into failures in the policing of child abuse in New Zealand, is due to be questioned by the UK parliament's home affairs select committee in a hearing from 2pm on Wednesday (1am Thursday NZ time).

Last week she told the BBC that survivors would be at the forefront of the inquiry and it would draw on the lessons of recent scandals such as large-scale child sex exploitation in the Rotherham, northern England.

"It is a very broad landscape and the inquiry is very complex and multi-faceted but it needs to be achievable as well," she said.

"It needs to set goals that are achievable in the interests of the survivors of child sexual abuse but also the state.

"It must be managed because an inquiry that drags on and does not have achievable goals that cannot deliver is not an effective inquiry."