Abuse victims to demand Woolf quits inquiry role

Representatives of alleged child abuse victims will call for the resignation of the City lawyer chosen to chair the Government’s inquiry when they meet the inquiry panel’s secretariat for the first time today.

The meeting comes amid growing pressure on lord mayor of London Fiona Woolf following claims that she tried to play down her social links with former home secretary Lord Brittan, whose role is expected to come under scrutiny in the investigation.

The head of ChildLine, Sue Minto (pictured), declined several times to give Mrs Woolf her personal backing in an interview in which she said it was important to listen to the views of victims.

Pressed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme over whether she thought Mrs Woolf should stay, Ms Minto said: “I think the most important thing is to ensure that whoever chairs the inquiry also has an excellent team, a team that has the experience and the ability and the expertise to make sure this is full and thorough.

“I think the NSPCC and ChildLine are both saying that we think that whilst the chair is a very important person, actually it’s much more important that the people that are really doing the delving and the digging have got experience and expertise.”

Mrs Woolf is not expected to be at today’s meeting with representatives of victims, including lawyer Alison Millar of solicitors Leigh Day, whose spokesman said: “Alison Millar will be calling for the chair to step down because our clients just don’t have faith in her.”

Documents published last night showed that a letter setting out Mrs Woolf’s contacts with Lord Brittan and his wife was redrafted seven times, with guidance from Home Office officials, before being sent to Home Secretary Theresa May.

Chair of the Commons Home Affairs Committee Keith Vaz said Mrs Woolf”s appointment had been “chaotic” and she should decide whether she wishes to remain as chair of the inquiry.

Mr Vaz agreed that the loss of a second chair – after Baroness Butler-Sloss stood down earlier this year amid allegations of conflicts of interest – would be damaging to the inquiry, and said it was not for his committee to determine whether she should stay on.

He told the Today programme: “It’s for Mrs Woolf to look at the history of this and decide whether she has the time, the space, the knowledge and the desire to do this work, and she must make that decision.

“I think what the victims want – and what they have wanted all along – is that this process starts as quickly as possible, with an inquiry team that is experienced, that is competent, where there are no questions of conflicts of interest. This unfortunately has not happened and we hope that this will now progress in some way or the other.”

The chief executive of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, Pete Saunders, who will also attend today’s meeting, told Today: “If you’re going to put together an inquiry into this massive problem, then surely you would appoint a group of specialists who know something about the subject and will have the confidence of the people who are suffering from that particular issue.

“Nobody is having a pop at Fiona Woolf as a person – I’m sure she’s a person of high integrity – but she has no qualification whatsoever to lead an inquiry into such a deeply, deeply disturbing issue as child abuse. She has no qualifications to do that, she has no experience, she has said as much, so why should we appoint somebody (like that)?

“Survivors of abuse have been waiting for a long time for something like this to come along. I’ve yet to meet anybody from the survivor organisations or individual survivors who have any faith in Fiona Woolf’s chairship, or indeed many of the people on the panel.

“Her link with Leon Brittan is unquestioned and for that reason alone she should stand down. Why don’t the Government appoint somebody with credibility, a Helena Kennedy or a Michael Mansfield?”

Former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald said Mrs Woolf “needs to have a serious conversation with the Home Secretary” about her position.

Lord Macdonald told Today: “She’s obviously in a difficult position now and it’s obviously the case that if people who have the greatest interest in the outcome of this inquiry are saying they don’t have confidence in her, her position is particularly difficult.”

But the Liberal Democrat peer said: “The bigger problem here is that this process has all the makings of an inquiry into everything everywhere – it’s looking at the professions, the armed services, the health service, the education system, social services, prisons, the churches, the BBC, political parties. I think expectations are being raised by the breadth of this, but the breadth of it may make it undeliverable.

“I’m not sure that this vast, massively ambitious, over-extensive process is going to tell us anything that we don’t basically already know.”

Mr Vaz said the final version of the letter sent by Mrs Woolf to Mrs May “gave a sense of greater detachment” about her relationship with the Brittans than the earlier documents.

The Labour MP told Today it was “pretty extraordinary” that the Lord Mayor had received assistance in writing the letter: “I would have thought that on an inquiry as serious as this, the person who was going to head this very sensitive and important inquiry should have written the letter herself and that this should have been disclosed before appointment. It’s very clear that the Home Office had its own views of what should have gone into this letter.

“This is not something that should be left, in my view, to the Home Office. This should have been the work of the person appointed. It adds to the general way in which the whole process has operated, which has been in my view chaotic.”

Mr Vaz said his committee would decide in a meeting next week whether Mrs Woolf should be recalled to give further evidence, saying that her letter “raises more questions than it answers”.

He added: “I think it’s important that all those who sit on the panel, and Mrs Woolf, make sure that all the information that is available is out there in the public domain, it’s open and transparent and that whatever information is put before Parliament and the public is accurate. This was not the case when the first letter was written to us and it was certainly not the case when Mrs Woolf came before the committee.”

Mrs Woolf’s links to Lord Brittan have come under scrutiny because he is likely to be called to give evidence to the inquiry about his handling of child abuse allegations.

The former cabinet minister denies failing to act on a dossier of paedophilia allegations he received while in office in the 1980s.

In her letter to the Home Secretary, Mrs Woolf said she had lived in the same street as the Brittans since 2004 and as well as inviting the Brittans to dinner at her house three times, she has dined at theirs twice, met Lady Brittan for coffee, sat on a prize-giving panel with her, and sponsored her £50 for a fun run.

She told Mrs May she had had no “social contact” with Lord and Lady Brittan since April 23 last year.

But Mr Vaz sought clarification from the City lawyer after a photograph surfaced showing her chatting to Lady Brittan at a prize-giving last October.

In her response to Mr Vaz’s request for more information, Mrs Woolf said she did not recall any “substantial interaction” with Lady Brittan at the October 2013 event.

Mrs Woolf disclosed that the first draft of her letter to the Home Secretary was written by the solicitor and counsel to her inquiry, which she “reviewed and reworked” with their assistance.

The drafts were also circulated to officials in the Home Office and lawyers representing Mrs May in legal proceedings about the inquiry.

In an early draft Mrs Woolf said: “I first met with Lord Brittan in a personal capacity when I was invited by Lady Brittan to a dinner party hosted at their residence in 2008. From recollection there were approximately eight people at this dinner.

“I returned the compliment and I hosted a dinner party at my residence about six months later. We engaged in another exchange of dinner parties after I was elected Sheriff of the City of London in 2011.”

A later, undated draft said “from my recollection there were no other guests who attended” the dinners at the Brittans’ house.

By the final version, there were more details about the dinner parties, but Mrs Woolf indicated that they were focused on City of London matters, rather then purely social occasions.

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