May set to announce Westminster child abuse inquiry

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, is to address MPs over allegations of organised child sex abuse at Westminster in the 1980s.

Mrs May will give details of the probe as she makes a statement to MPs about claims of organised child abuse at Westminster in the 1980s.

However, she is likely to stop short of launching the full public inquiry being demanded in some quarters.

Former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Tebbit fuelled the clamour over the weekend when he said there “may well” have been a political cover-up at the time in order to protect “the system”.

A Home Office spokesman said: “It is right that the detail of her statement should wait until she speaks in the House of Commons, but her statement will address the two key public concerns.

“First, 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.”

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Chancellor George Osborne said the investigation would go “as far as it needs to go”.

“The best approach to this is to find an independent and authoritative way to investigate it,” he said.

“The Home Secretary is going to be setting out to the House of Commons in just a few hours’ time the approach we are going to take.

“But people can be absolutely clear, these are very, very serious matters, we take them very seriously, we want to get to the truth and nothing but the truth, and we will do it in an independent and authoritative way.”

The inquiry – which could involve a panel of experts taking evidence from the public – is expected to take place alongside a QC-led review of the Home Office’s failure to keep hold of documents alleging organised abuse.

The department has admitted that more than 100 files went missing over a period of 20 years. They included a dossier handed to former home secretary Lord Brittan by then-MP Geoffrey Dickens.

It was reported today that police have traced an alleged victim who has “implicated a senior political figure”.

The man, who is now in his 40s, has given a detailed account of how he was assaulted by the politician, the Telegraph said, but has so far refused to make a formal statement to detectives.

The Home Office is also facing claims that a leading member of the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) used its premises to store material.

Steven Adrian Smith had clearance to work as an electrical contractor at the Westminster building in the late 1970s and early 1980s when he chaired PIE.

According to the BBC, in a 1986 book available in a restricted part of the British Library, he wrote: “I had a furnished office completely to myself seven days a week on a rotating shift basis.

“Much of PIE’s less sensitive file material was stored in locked cabinets there, where no police raid would ever have found them.”

Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper accused the Home Office of failing to respond to legitimate public concerns.

“The Government must take these concerns extremely seriously – to make sure justice is done for victims of abuse no matter how long ago, to make sure that any institutional failure is uncovered, and to make sure that lessons are learnt and that child protection is as effective as possible for the future,” she said.

“We need a wide-ranging review that can look at how all the allegations put to the Home Office in the 80s and 90s were handled. Any stones left unturned will leave concerns of institutional malaise, or worse a cover-up, unaddressed.”

Appearing yesterday on BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show, Lord Tebbit said the atmosphere at the time the allegations took place was very different to that prevailing today.

“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,” he said.

Asked if he thought there had been a “big political cover-up” at the time, he said: “I think there may well have been.”

He added: “It was almost unconscious. It was the thing that people did at that time.”

The extraordinary comments by one of Baroness Thatcher’s closest political allies intensified demands from MPs and lawyers for an over-arching public inquiry into all the disparate allegations of child abuse from that era.

They include claims of abuse by the late Liberal MP Sir Cyril Smith and allegations of paedophile activity at parties attended by politicians and other prominent figures at the Elm Guest House in Barnes, south-west London.

The Telegraph said the alleged victim, who is now based in the United States, claimed he was abused at Elm Guest House but for reasons unknown has now decided he does not want to talk to Scotland Yard detectives.

A spokesman for the force declined to comment.

The permanent secretary at the Home Office, Mark Sedwill, has said he will be appointing a senior legal figure to conduct a fresh review into what happened to a dossier relating to alleged paedophile activity at Westminster which was passed to the then home secretary, Leon (now Lord) Brittan, by the Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in 1983.

Over the weekend, he disclosed that a previous review – carried out only last year – had identified 114 potentially relevant files from the period 1979 to 1999, which could not be located and were “presumed destroyed, missing or not found”.

Mr Sedwill said he had ordered the new investigation – following the intervention of Prime Minister David Cameron – in order to establish whether the findings of the previous review remained “sound”.

The earlier review – conducted by an HM Revenue and Customs investigator – concluded the relevant information in the Dickens file had been passed to the police and the rest of the material destroyed in line with departmental policy at the time.