UNITED KINGDOM
Parliament
Independent Inquiry into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse
I make this memorandum available to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee in response to Mr Vaz’s letter of 5 August and his and my subsequent exchange of letters of 31 August. I request that this memorandum be placed before the full Committee. In it I have set out for the Committee’s consideration the responses Mr Vaz specifically sought and have also included a brief outline of what I see as various critical issues facing the Inquiry. This I do for the purpose of assisting the Inquiry in the future.
I commence by briefly traversing the history of the Inquiry in its various iterations.
A brief history and the early legacy
As you are aware, the Inquiry was first established in July 2014 as a non- statutory Inquiry. I understand this was in the interests of getting it up and running as quickly as possible. It was however contemplated that the Government could move to have it reconstituted as a statutory Inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005, if the Chair thought that were necessary.
It is a matter of history that two Chairs were briefly appointed, the first in July 2014 and the second in October 2014. In conjunction with the second appointment, broad ranging terms of reference were promulgated and 8 Panel members appointed, together with Counsel to the Inquiry, Ben Emmerson QC, and an expert adviser.
It is unnecessary now to traverse that early history in any detail, except to note there were reports of difficulties within the Inquiry Panel, as well as conflicting political views over its composition in the wider victim and survivor communities. Of more critical moment is that the absence of leadership during that early period meant the Inquiry could not undertake any fundamental planning or initial scoping of its task nor develop a clear sense of direction.
As is also evident from media reports and commentary at the time, those two false starts served to engender or further fuel negative perceptions about the Inquiry’s overall prospects of success. One example is the article by Andrew Gilligan in the Daily Telegraph of 4 November 2014, entitled “Whether Fiona Woolf heads it or not, the child abuse inquiry will fail.”
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