The Guardian view on the child sex abuse inquiry: obscurity adds insult to injury

The Guardian
October 18, 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/18/the-guardian-view-on-the-child-sex-abuse-inquiry-obscurity-adds-insult-to-injury

The new chair of the child sex abuse inquiry, Professor Alexis Jay. ‘If anyone can restore faith in the process, the woman who untangled the Rotherham sex abuse scandal has the best chance.’ Photo by Martin Hunter

If it were less important for the victims and survivors of abuse, the tale of the biggest and most costly statutory inquiry ever launched would be a farce. But the scale of the responsibility of the independent inquiry into the institutional failure that allowed thousands of children to be abused over decades leached the humour from this afternoon’s Commons home affairs committee session with permanent secretary Mark Sedwill. After an hour of parrying and blocking MPs’ questions it felt damagingly like a high grade version of the institutional cover-ups that victims and survivors of abuse want the inquiry to expose.

Mr Sedwill was in an impossible position. The more he tried to argue that the independence of the inquiry into historic child abuse meant he could not know what was going on, the harder it was to understand why he had met the former chair, Dame Lowell Goddard, on at least two occasions. It was even more confusing that a member of the panel with which Dame Lowell was supposed to be working, Drusilla Sharpling, had actually raised her concerns with the Home Office in April this year, several months before Dame Lowell’s abrupt resignation in August.

The permanent secretary is impaled on the relationship between the inquiry, with its budget of £17m, and its sponsoring department, the Home Office. In a manner that must have appeared suspiciously opaque to victims and survivors of abuse, he tried to explain how an arm’s-length relationship can coexist alongside the home secretary’s power to hire and fire the inquiry’s chair. To those forgiving of the ways of Whitehall, this is an everyday expression of the kind of arrangement that keeps the bureaucracy moving; Mr Sedwill said the Home Office was insulated from the inquiry by an air gap. To the lay observer, it seems incomprehensible that the department, which has supplied a fifth of the inquiry’s staff, would not have got wind of the troubles at the top that led within weeks not only to the resignation of Dame Lowell, the third chair to exit unexpectedly, but also the departure of the inquiry’s counsel, Ben Emmerson QC, and its junior counsel, Elizabeth Prochaska.

From this afternoon’s committee hearings, first with the inquiry’s fourth chair, Professor Alexis Jay, and two members of her panel and then with Mr Sedwill, it is clear that concern about Dame Lowell’s management of the inquiry had been mounting for months. But under the terms of her appointment – and to protect her independence from government interference – she could be dismissed only with “concrete evidence” of misconduct or incompetence. Not only was the evidence lacking – and Dame Lowell strongly denies press reports of bullying and racist behaviour – but there would have been understandable alarm at the risk to the whole inquiry that would follow losing yet another leader. Yet in the struggle to keep proceedings on track, which included bringing in a facilitator to try to mediate between the chair and the advisory panel that she made clear she did not want – a damaging atmosphere of infighting and mistrust built up.

At the end of July, Mr Sedwill finally learned of the crisis. Less than a week later, following a report in the Times that she had spent three months of her first year abroad, Dame Lowell resigned. In an indication of Whitehall panic, she took a £60,000 payoff to which her contract (it now emerges) did not entitle her. The inquiry is now in the charge of Professor Jay. If anyone can restore faith in the process, the woman who untangled the Rotherham sex abuse scandal has the best chance. This must surely be the final chapter.