The Power of the Paedos - another high profile case hits the 'never happened' wall?

[David Guyatt]

Pressure continues to grow on Cameron to stop flaming people with ordering a new review of an old review and order a proper independent inquiry that will get to the bottom of this affair.

And for the first time in public (that I am aware of anyway) one of several allegations has now surfaced regarding, former Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, who was questioned by police, last month, over a historic rape allegation. From what I understand, he was also questioned by police months ago about a certain VHS video recording and a young under age boy at Elm Guest House?

Leon Brittan Exclusive: Tory peer was questioned last month by police over rape allegation



Former home secretary accused of raping 19-year-old student in 1967

JAMIE MERRILL

Sunday 06 July 2014

The former cabinet minister Leon Brittan has been questioned by police under caution in connection with an alleged rape, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

It is understood that the former Conservative home secretary has been accused of raping a 19-year-old student at his London flat in 1967 before he became an MP.
The alleged female victim is believed to have claimed that Lord Brittan, who went on to serve as home secretary from 1983 to 1985, raped her in his central London flat after a blind date.
It is understood that Lord Brittan strongly denied the allegation. The veteran Conservative figure, who was made a life peer in 2000, is understood to have been questioned by police at the central London offices of his lawyers Mishcon De Reya last month.
Last night a Metropolitan Police spokesman confirmed an allegation of rape had been made against a man in his seventies over an incident in 1967. The spokesman said: "The woman was over the age of 18 at the time of the incident. The allegation is being investigated by officers from the Sexual Offences, Exploitation and Child Abuse Command. In June 2014, a man aged in his seventies was interviewed under caution by appointment at a central London location in connection with the allegation. He was not arrested. Enquiries continue."



MP Tom WatsonLast night, Lord Brittan declined to discuss the allegation, saying: "I'm sorry, I'm not going to talk about anything like that." Mishcon De Reya did not respond to requests for comment.
The detectives who questioned the veteran Conservative politician are understood to be part of Scotland Yard's Operation Fairbank inquiry team which was launched after Tom Watson MP made allegations of widespread child abuse in Parliament. The specific rape allegations against Lord Brittan are understood to have nothing to do with the Met's Operation Fernbridge investigations into child abuse.
The Home Office announced last night that it will re-examine a 2013 review into Mr Watson's allegations. The original review found that the department passed all relevant information concerning historical child abuse claims to police.
Mark Sedwill, Home Office Permanent Secretary, wrote to the Prime Minister confirming he would "engage a senior independent legal figure to assess" the outcome of the 2013 investigation. The review found that the Home Office had acted appropriately in relation to historical complaints of child abuse.



MP Keith VazHowever, in a separate letter yesterday to Keith Vaz MP, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Mr Sedwill detailed how this review had established that 114 "potentially relevant files" had either been lost or destroyed.
He also added that it had not found a "single dossier" from late Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens, which was handed to Lord Brittan when he was home secretary in the 1980s. Rather, the 2013 report found records showing several "sets of correspondence".
The so-called "Dickens dossier", which was reported to contain allegations of a predatory paedophile network operating in Westminster during the 1980s, was at the centre of controversy last week when Lord Brittan confirmed he was handed the dossier. He said he had asked his officials to "look carefully" at the material.

Now I wonder why the Met spokesman made the point of stating that the alleged rape was "over the age of 18 at the time." Rape is rape. Was he alluding to something else altogether or seeking to deflect other more compelling questions?

[David Guyatt]

Personally, I think "he knows". He was one of Thatcher's praetorian guard and would know, "I believe".

Lord Tebbit hints at political cover-up in 1980s over child abuse

Ex-Thatcher minister says people's instinct was to protect 'the system' as it emerged a further 114 documents have been lost

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• Daniel Boffey and agencies
  
  
• theguardian.com, Sunday 6 July 2014 10.42 BST
  

Lord Tebbit: 'There may well have been [a cover-up]. But it was almost unconscious. It was the thing that people did at that time.' Photograph: Felix Clay

The former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Tebbit has said he believes there "may well" have been a political cover-up over child abuse in the 1980s.
Lord Tebbit, who served in a series of ministerial posts under Margaret Thatcher, said the instinct of people at the time was to protect "the system" and not to delve too deeply into uncomfortable allegations.
His comment came as the Home Office announced a fresh legal review into what happened to a file alleging paedophile activity at Westminster in the 1980s that was handed to the then home secretary Leon (now Lord) Brittan by the Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens.
But as it emerged on Sunday that a further 114 possibly relevant files have also gone missing from government files the government again ruled out a public inquiry into the allegations.
Michael Gove told the BBC1's Andrew Marr Show that the inquiry, to be led by a senior lawyer, would suffice, highlighting the fact that there were ongoing criminal inquiries. He said that he and the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, were also reviewwing current child protection practice to ensure that children were properly protected.
Also appearing on The Andrew Marr Show, Tebbit said: "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 here and there that it was more important to protect the system than to delve too far into it.
"That view, I think, was wrong then and it is spectacularly shown to be wrong because the abuses have grown."
Asked if he thought there had been a "big political cover-up" at the time, he said: "I think there may well have been. But it was almost unconscious. It was the thing that people did at that time."
The missing dossier compiled by Dickens is thought to have detailed allegations of a 1980s Westminster paedophile ring and is now known to be one of 114 potentially relevant Home Office files destroyed, lost or missing, it has emerged.
David Cameron has already ordered the Home Office permanent secretary to look into what happened to the lost dossier but the revelation that further relevant documents have disappeared will raise fresh fears of an establishment cover-up.
Simon Danczuk, the MP for Rochdale, who is calling for an overarching national inquiry into historical child abuse, said: "I had absolutely no idea these other files were also missing. The public view will be that there is something fishy going on. The public will understandably think these documents have gone missing because it helps protect the names of those identified in them. That is the conclusion that many will come to, and who could blame them"
Tom Watson, the Labour MP central to the uncovering of the phone-hacking scandal, said it was increasingly clear than only a Hillsborough-style inquiry would reassure the public. He said: "Only an overarching inquiry will get to the facts, everything else the government says or does on this is a diversion."
Dickens, who died in 1995, had told his family that the information he handed to the home secretary in 1983 and 1984 would "blow the lid off" the lives of powerful and famous child abusers, including eight well-known figures.
In a letter to Dickens at the time, Brittan suggested his information would be passed to the police, but Scotland Yard says it has no record of any investigation into the allegations. On Saturday, the Home Office made public a letter to Keith Vaz, the chairman of the home affairs select committee, in which the department confirmed that correspondence from Dickens had not been retained and it had found "no record of specific allegations by Mr Dickens of child sex abuse by prominent public figures".
The Home Office's permanent secretary, Mark Sedwill, admitted, however, that a further 114 documents relevant to allegations of child abuse were missing from the department's records. That discovery was made last year by an independent review into information received about organised child sex abuse but was not published in its report. Sedwill told Vaz the missing documents were some of the 36,000 records which officials presumed were lost, destroyed or missing. They were not part of the 278,000 documents the Home Office destroyed as part of its "retention and destruction" policy.
However, Sedwill told Vaz in a letter published on Saturday that the department had found "no evidence of the inappropriate removal or destruction of material".
He also wrote to the prime minister to tell him he would engage a senior independent legal figure to assess whether last year's conclusions "remain sound".
Sedwill told Vaz: "Like any other citizen, I am horrified by what we have learned in the past couple of years about the systematic abuse of children and vulnerable adults by prominent public figures, and the state's failure to protect them. Some have been brought to justice, and I hope that the police investigations now under way across the country are equally successful. The Home Office has and will cooperate fully with any police inquiry."
Vaz said the number of files lost were of an "industrial scale". He told BBC Breakfast he welcomed the letter from Sedwill, adding: "We will want to pose further questions of course, because there's a lot of information that we didn't know was in existence that he's given us in this letter.
"But also I think that the government and Mr Sedwill should work with parliament in fashioning a set of terms of reference that will satisfy all those who are dissatisfied with the way in which matters have been progressed so far - so I think it's an important step which we welcome."
Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the public accounts committee, said there had been a "veil of secrecy" over the establishment for far too long.
Appearing on Sky News's Murnaghan programme, she added: "Thank God it is coming out into the open. I think the really interesting thing about it is there has been a veil of secrecy over the establishment for far too long.
"Now the establishment who thought they were always protected … find actually they are subject to the same rigours of the law and that's right.
"What we really need to get right as well is how children are cared for today. Let's learn from the historic abuse, let's actually give victims the right to have their voice on that, but let's actually also focus on the present."

[David Guyatt]

The pot is bubbling...

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."

And just announced this morning:

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.
Jump media player

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."

The pressure will continue for a judge led inquiry, as the one May had announced is still too little too late.

[Magda Hassan]

So there is another copy of the file!

[Magda Hassan]

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?

[David Guyatt]

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.

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]
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."

[David Guyatt]

I wasn't going to post the below article, but on reflection felt I needed to.

There are a number of issues with the announced inquiry. Firstly, who will head it and what powers they will have and under what rules?

Also, May has said that the inquiry "will be able to examine the files of the Security Services." Does this include Special Branch which falls under the jurisdiction of the police? It's an important question because by many accounts it was SB officers who were the bully boys doing the covering up and cleaning up, and my guess is that it doesn't include them because they are not specifically mentioned. Additionally, no one, no matter how competent they may be, can examine files that have been destroyed.

The last point is that this is a political fix, because the inquiry's report won't be published until after the next election and by that time David Cameron will almost certainly have left office and be sucking up huge gobs of pension cash elsewhere.

Lastly, the ghastly David Mellor - another old Conservative cabinet member - can well and truly bugger off. He should stick to making inane statements about Chelsea football club.

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".

[Magda Hassan]

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

He kept a copy for himself, but his wife destroyed it after his death...

[Dawn Meredith]

This stuff always has a way of being disappeared. People in high places rarely get justice.