Quote:Westminster child abuse exclusive: Geoffrey Dickens also gave copy of file to top prosecutor Sir Thomas Hetherington - so why did DPP also fail to act on evidence of paedophile ring?




Home Secretary likely to come under pressure to explain how two government agencies were able to 'lose' the dossier

CHRIS GREEN

SENIOR REPORTER

Sunday 06 July 2014

Fears over an establishment cover-up of an alleged Westminster paedophile ring in the 1980s deepened on Sunday night as it emerged that an "explosive" dossier of evidence lost by the Home Office was also handed to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The file, believed to contain child abuse allegations relating to at least eight public figures, was compiled by the campaigning Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens, who died in 1995.
Last week David Cameron ordered an investigation into how it came to be lost by the Home Office, which has since confirmed that 114 files relating to historical complaints of child abuse have either been misplaced or destroyed.
Two copies of the dossier were previously thought to have existed: one was handed to Leon Brittan, Home Secretary at the time, while the other was kept at Mr Dickens's family home and was later destroyed by his wife.
But in a newspaper interview in August 1983 two months into Leon Brittan's term as Home Secretary under Margaret Thatcher Mr Dickens revealed he had also sent a copy to the then Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Sir Thomas Hetherington.
On Monday the Home Secretary Theresa May is due to make a statement on the affair in the House of Commons. She is likely to come under pressure to explain how two government agencies were able to "lose" the dossier. She may also be asked to reveal whether a previous Home Office trawl of its records included files held by security services.
READ MORE: MICHAEL GOVE RULES OUT PUBLIC INQUIRY
EXCLUSIVE: LEON BRITTAN QUESTIONED BY POLICE OVER RAPE ALLEGATION
PRESSURE MOUNTS OVER FILE ON ALLEGED WESTMINSTER PAEDOPHILE RING

Lord Tebbit, the former Conservative cabinet minister, said on Sunday there "may well" have been a cover-up over a powerful child abuse ring. "At that time I think most people would have thought that the establishment, the system, was to be protected and if a few things had gone wrong it was more important to protect the system than to delve too far into it," he told the BBC's The Andrew Marr Show.
Asked if he thought there had been a "political cover-up" in the 1980s, he replied: "I think there may well have been. But it was almost unconscious. It was the thing that people did at that time."

Lord Tebbit said there may have been an 'almost unconscious' cover-up (Getty)
The existence of a third copy of Mr Dickens's dossier is likely to intensify demands for a full national inquiry into allegations of organised child sex abuse, which Mr Cameron has previously dismissed. A public petition on the Change.org website organised by Labour MP Tom Watson had on Sunday evening attracted more than 21,000 signatures.
In the interview, published in the Daily Express, Mr Dickens said he had spent two years investigating high-profile paedophiles. "I've got eight names of big people, public figures. And I'm going to expose them in Parliament," he told the newspaper. "I have not enjoyed this crusade. It's been horrible. One of the people among those eight has been a friend of mine."
By that stage he had also passed the information he held to Sir Thomas. "Mr Dickens's own list of eight public figures involved in the sex scandal was handed to the director earlier this week … together with the warning that he would name them in Parliament if necessary," the article said.
Sir Thomas, who died in 2007, held the position of DPP from 1977 to 1987 and was the first head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which was founded in 1986. It is understood that the CPS searched its archives for the dossier last year when the Home Office conducted a review of information relating to "organised child sex abuse", but was unable to find anything possibly because the file was handed to the DPP before it came into existence.

Home Secretary Theresa May is due to make a statement on the affair (Getty)
A CPS spokesman said: "Based on the details given, as far as we are able to ascertain from available records we hold no information."
Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, who has previously backed Mr Cameron in rejecting calls for a full inquiry, appeared to soften his stance on the subject on Sunday. "I wouldn't rule anything out," he told the BBC's Sunday Politics programme.
On Saturday, the Home Office Permanent Secretary Mark Sedwill revealed that more than 100 documents relating to historic allegations of organised child abuse between 1979 and 1999 were "presumed destroyed, missing or not found". In a letter to Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, he said the review carried out last year had not found any documents provided by Mr Dickens in which he named public figures.
Mr Vaz said on Sunday that the number of files lost by the Home Office was of an "industrial scale", adding that his committee had called Mr Sedwill to give evidence on the missing documents tomorrow. He will also be told to name the "senior legal figure" he has appointed to investigate whether the Home Office's original review was sound.

Chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, Keith Vaz (Getty)
David Mellor, who served under Leon Brittan as a Home Office minister, said the feeling at the time was that Mr Dickens's dossier did not contain the shocking revelations he suggested. "My only recollection of this from my time at the Home Office was the suggestion there wasn't much to it," he told Sky News.
"The real crunch point for me is if and I don't believe this for a millisecond Leon Brittan had not taken appropriate action, Geoffrey Dickens lived for another 11 years and there is no evidence he went back and followed it up."

Quote:7 July 2014 Last updated at 08:49Share this page

May 'to outline wide-ranging child abuse inquiry'


The home secretary will give a statement to MPs on Monday

• Paedophile leader 'used Home Office'
  
• 1980s abuse cover-up 'possible'
  
• New review over MP abuse 'dossier'
  

Theresa May is to outline plans for a "wide-ranging" inquiry, led by an expert panel, into historic child sex abuse claims, the BBC understands.
The BBC's Nick Robinson said the inquiry would look at claims covering the government, the NHS and the BBC.
The inquiry would be held in public but evidence would not be given under oath.
The home secretary will also tell MPs about a separate review of whether her department failed to act on claims of a paedophile ring when they in the 1980s.
Mrs May's statement to MPs is expected at 15:30 BST.
The home secretary is also also set to announce a review into public bodies and their duty of care towards children.
Labour has been calling for a full public inquiry into the various child sex abuse claims from the past. Shadow home Secretary Yvette Cooper told BBC Radio 5Live she would have to wait and see the full details of the inquiry being planned.
However, she welcomed reports that it would be wide-ranging and cover all the various allegations - as long as a police investigations into specific claims continued.
"Whether it's in the NHS about Savile, whether it's the BBC, whether it's in the Home Office, we need to make sure that all the lessons are learned so that we can have a strong enough child protection system for the future."
Lessons learnedBBC Political Editor Nick Robinson said the form of the inquiry could be similar in style to the Hillsborough inquiry - with experts taking evidence mostly in public.
It would not be a full judge-led public inquiry, such as the Leveson or the Hutton inquiries which had witnesses giving evidence under oath, he said.
Ministers have so far rejected calls for an over-arching public inquiry into the various abuse allegations from the era, pointing to ongoing police investigations.
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Nick Clegg: 'Nothing more revolting than people in power working with each other, possibly covering up'

Over the weekend it was announced that a senior legal figure from outside Whitehall is to look again into a Home Office review last year of any information it received in the 1980s and 1990s about organised child sex abuse.
It is to look at what happened to a dossier of abuse claims reportedly passed to then Home Secretary Leon Brittan in the 1980s by the late Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens.
Lord Brittan said he handed the papers to officials - but their whereabouts are currently unknown.


The 2013 Home Office review found Lord Brittan had acted appropriately in dealing with the allegations
In a separate development, the BBC has seen a written account by the former leader of a pro-paedophile campaign group who claims he stored material at the Home Office while working there as an electrical contractor in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The Home Office declined to comment on claims Steven Adrian Smith - jailed in 1991 and 2011 - had his own office in the department.
It said an inquiry into whether his Paedophile Information Exchange received any public funds was ongoing.
Duty of careA Home Office spokesman said Mrs May's statement would address: "The Home Office's response in the 1980s to papers containing allegations of child abuse.
"And second, the wider issue of whether public bodies and other institutions have taken seriously their duty of care towards children."

Lord Tebbit: "People thought that the establishment was to be protected"

On Sunday, former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Tebbit said there "may well have been" a political cover-up.
Lord Tebbit, who served in various ministerial roles under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, said at the time people had an "almost unconscious" tendency to protect "the system".

The potential here is for the Home Office to have lost files that could have stopped abusers from carrying on abusing children"

Labour MP Simon Danczuk
Last year's Home Office review found 527 potentially relevant files which it had kept, but a further 114 were missing, destroyed or "not found".
Among the files found, there were 13 pieces of information about alleged child abuse, the Home Office's top civil servant Mark Sedwill said in a letter to the chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee.
Nine of those 13 were already known or had been reported to the police. They included four cases involving Home Office staff, Mr Sedwill said.
The remaining four items, which had not been previously disclosed, have now been passed to police, Mr Sedwill added - although a Home Office spokeswoman said "now" meant during the 2013 review, as opposed to at the time the allegations were received.
'Flabbergasting'The Metropolitan Police declined to comment on the Home Office files but said it was "assessing information" as part of Operation Fairbank - set up in 2012 after Labour MP Tom Watson made claims about a "powerful paedophile ring" linked to a previous prime minister's "senior adviser" and Parliament.
Mr Watson has set up an online petition calling on the prime minister to "make amends for historic failures" by establishing a national inquiry, which has now been signed by more than 55,000 people.
Labour MP, Simon Danczuk, who has campaigned for claims of abuse at Westminster to be investigated, has described the situation as "flabbergasting".
He told the BBC: "We know from child abusers that if they aren't stopped in their tracks, then they will carry on abusing.
"So the potential here is for the Home Office to have lost files that could have stopped abusers from carrying on abusing children.
"I can't think of anything more devastating than that. The public will believe that they've been lost deliberately in an attempt to hide the names of the people named in the files - and you can't blame the public for reaching that conclusion."

Magda Hassan Wrote:Just trying to work out how the prosecution system is set up in the UK. Is the DPP the same as the Crown Prosecution Service?

Quote:The Crown Prosecution Service ([B]CPS) is the principal public prosecuting authority in England and Wales, with responsibility for conducting the vast majority of prosecutions for alleged criminal offences within the jurisdiction. It is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom, headed by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

Quote:Theresa May vows child abuse inquiry will take on the establishment

Inquiry may examine security service files and claims the Tory whips' office in the 1970s may have suppressed allegations

• Patrick Wintour, political editor
  
• The Guardian, Tuesday 8 July 2014
  

Link to video: Theresa May promises 'maximum transparency' in child abuse inquiryA soul-searching national inquiry into how authorities may have ignored systematic child abuse in some of Britain's most eminent institutions was launched by the home secretary.
Theresa May told the Commons she was establishing a powerful public inquiry into how complaints of sexual abuse were treated, and sometimes ignored, in public bodies over several decades.
Ministers had been holding out against such a sweeping inquiry, but, facing charges of an establishment cover-up, succumbed and promised there would be no no-go areas for the investigation.
The inquiry will be able to examine the files of the security services and allegations that the Tory whips' office in the 1970s may have suppressed allegations of child abuse by members of the parliamentary party. It is also expected to take some evidence from victims.
Labour MPs pointed to a 1985 BBC documentary in which a former government whip between 1970 and 1973 said that the Tory whips' office, when faced by an MP involved in "a scandal with small boys", would get him out of trouble, partly so the MP then felt obliged in the future to carry out the bidding of the whips.
May said she would look at plans, backed in principle by the Labour MP Tom Watson, to require public servants to report allegations of child abuse to officials in a form of mandatory whistleblowing. A duty to report would place some form of culpability on a public official if they knowingly withheld information concerning suspected child abuse.
Downing Street's haste to bow to the cross-party Westminster mood for a public reckoning was such that May, in her statement to MPs, was unable to name the chair of the expert panel that would lead the inquiry or its precise terms of reference. Separately, May said she had appointed Peter Wanless, chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), to examine how the Home Office last year reviewed allegations of child abuse by Westminster politicians between 1979 and 1999. Wanless will report within eight to 10 weeks.
However, while the broader public inquiry will produce an interim report before next year's election, the full report will not be completed until afterwards, May said.
A Home Office review last year found 114 potentially relevant files on child abuse were missing, destroyed or lost, but despite that May said last year's review found all credible evidence of child abuse had been passed to the prosecuting authorities.
May told MPs: "Our priority must be the prosecution of the people behind these disgusting crimes. That wherever possible and consistent with the need to prosecute we will adopt a presumption of maximum transparency. And that where there has been a failure to protect children from abuse, we will expose it and we will learn from it."
The flurry of activity follows many months of scandals involving celebrities and other figures in authority, but turned to Westminster at the weekend with claims that the former Conservative home secretary Lord Brittan had not properly handled potentially explosive allegations of child abuse by Westminster politicians brought to him in the 1980s by the late Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens.
Brittan came under further pressure after it emerged that he had been questioned by police in 1967 over reports that a woman had accused him of raping her. In a statementon Monday, Brittan said that allegation was "wholly without foundation" and said he had correctly dealt with the material brought to him by Dickens.
The former Home Office minister David Mellor also sprang to Brittan's defence, writing in the Guardian: "Quite how this innocuous tale became the scandalous allegations and innuendos we have been hearing in recent days, beggars belief. There is no evidence whatsoever that Dickens was remotely dismayed by the way his dossier was treated, so why are so many other people anxious to be more Catholic than the Pope?"
Meanwhile a review by the Home Office has found that public money was given to two organisations linked to the Paedophile Information Exchange in the 1970s but the group itself was not directly funded by the taxpayer. May, the home secretary, ordered the investigation after a former employee claimed around £30,000 was given to PIE by the voluntary services unit of the Home Office.
Westminster, still suffering the reputational damage of the expenses scandal, dare not risk the charge of suppressing evidence of systematic child abuse by peers or MPs.
May said the wider panel inquiry, welcomed by most Westminster politicians, would have full access to papers and would, if necessary, at its request be upgraded to full public-inquiry status in line with the Inquiries Act, capable of requiring witnesses to give evidence.
There was a tension on Monday about the extent to which the inquiry will seek out new facts or instead more broadly draw out thematic lessons on how public authorities treated complaints of the child sexual abuse partly drawing on the experience of cases of gang abuse in towns such as Rochdale and Oxford and whether any gaps in child protectionlegislation still exist. General inquiries have either completed or are already underway into how bodies such as the BBC or hospitals failed to protect children.
May told MPs that the panel inquiry was not supposed to supplant existing police investigations saying: "I would expect the panel if they found allegations they believed were more appropriate for the police to investigate under a criminal investigation, for those allegations to be passed to the police." It would also have to consider whether calling a witness would in any way jeopardise or prejudice a criminal investigation taking place.Yvette Cooper, shadow home secretary, welcomed the government's decision and said the allegations "all at their heart have a similar problem child victims weren't listened to, weren't heard, weren't protected and too many institutions let children down".

David Guyatt Wrote:

Magda Hassan Wrote:Just trying to work out how the prosecution system is set up in the UK. Is the DPP the same as the Crown Prosecution Service?

The below from Wiki. The DPP is a political appointment chosen by the Attorney General. The Director of DPPis "superintended by the Attorney General" who answers for it in parliament.

It's all a very nice way of making it seem independent when, in fact, it is entirely subservient to the government of the day.

Quote:The Crown Prosecution Service ([B]CPS) is the principal public prosecuting authority in England and Wales, with responsibility for conducting the vast majority of prosecutions for alleged criminal offences within the jurisdiction. It is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom, headed by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).[/B]

David Guyatt Wrote:Btw, that other copy got lost too... "Whoops, I put it down on the desk just for a mo, and the shredder grabbed and ate it. Sorry. Can't trust technology, eh."

Magda Hassan Wrote:

David Guyatt Wrote:

Magda Hassan Wrote:Just trying to work out how the prosecution system is set up in the UK. Is the DPP the same as the Crown Prosecution Service?

The below from Wiki. The DPP is a political appointment chosen by the Attorney General. The Director of DPPis "superintended by the Attorney General" who answers for it in parliament.

It's all a very nice way of making it seem independent when, in fact, it is entirely subservient to the government of the day.

Quote:The Crown Prosecution Service ([B]CPS) is the principal public prosecuting authority in England and Wales, with responsibility for conducting the vast majority of prosecutions for alleged criminal offences within the jurisdiction. It is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom, headed by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).[/B]

Thanks for that David. I was thinking it was a division between the political and judicial. I think our system is similar. I just found it interesting that the DPP forced the police to explain how they reviewed the old dropped rape case against Brittan. Presumably at the push by Simon Danczuk and he has the CPS in his sights.

David Guyatt Wrote:Btw, that other copy got lost too... "Whoops, I put it down on the desk just for a mo, and the shredder grabbed and ate it. Sorry. Can't trust technology, eh."

To lose one secret dossier is a tragedy but to lose 2 secret dossiers is beginning to look like design. Tragically. Let's hope he made more than 2 copies.

David Guyatt Wrote:He kept a copy for himself, but his wife destroyed it after his death...