UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Alan Travis
Wednesday 7 September 2016
The focus of the official inquiry into child sexual abuse will not be narrowed to exclude historical cases, the home secretary has made clear, as she also suggested that its former chair, Dame Lowell Goddard, may have quit because she was lonely.
Amber Rudd rejected claims by Goddard, who quit as chair last month, that the inquiry was too ambitious in scale and underfunded for the task it had been set.
The home secretary suggested that Goddard, a New Zealand high court judge and the third chair of the inquiry to depart, had resigned because “it was too much for her” and because she was lonely.
“I think she went … because she found it too much for her, and although she could contribute to it and there was some good work done in the past year, ultimately she found it too lonely,” Rudd said. “She was a long way from home and she decided to step down.”
Rudd confirmed to the Commons home affairs select committee that the child sexual abuse inquiry had repaid the Home Office £2.5m of its budget last year because of underspending, and suggested that Goddard had misrepresented the funding issue.
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