Child Abuse: Waterhouse Inquiry

Baroness Smith of Basildon Excerpts

Wednesday 14th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, that statement, coming from such a source, reinforces what I said. When we have asked a distinguished judge to carry out an inquiry, we have to be extremely careful as to whether they can be second guessed. I do not think that anything that the Prime Minister or the Government are doing calls into question the integrity of the Waterhouse inquiry. As we always are when distinguished judges take on these difficult tasks, we are in his debt for doing so. However, the review of the Waterhouse inquiry will look at whether any specific allegations of child abuse were not investigated. The serious allegations that have been made merit a further thorough investigation.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister, who has tried to bring some clarity to a question that I asked when the Statement was made. I sought to know what was meant by,

“whether the … inquiry was properly constituted and did its job”.—[Official Report, 6/11/12; col. 896.]

He will understand the concern that has been raised about that kind of inquiry. Does that beg the wider question of whether all these separate inquiries that are taking place—I think there are 10 in total now—should be constituted into one overarching inquiry, where we can look at the relationship between the different investigations? Getting to a position where we could deal with all the allegations in one overarching inquiry would bring together the kind of issues that will have to be dealt with to stop this kind of abuse happening again.

[Lord McNally]

It is true that there is now a large number of inquiries. The noble Baroness says 10 and my brief says nine, but I take the point. The Government did not rule out an overarching inquiry, but there is a time to pause on this. Some of the accusations have been put into perspective by rushing to judgment in an overheated way, through Twitter and the new technologies that we live in. Those in authority need to have confidence. We are talking about child abuse; a very serious crime, which people who have evidence of should report to the police. It is not a responsibility of judicial inquiries to find wrongdoers. It is for the police, and if there are people with evidence, they should take it to the police.

There is public concern about whether Waterhouse missed anything. We have asked a distinguished judge to do a specific task in relation to that: to look at whether any specific allegations of child abuse were missed by that investigation and then to make recommendations to the Secretary of State for Justice and the Secretary of State for Wales. That is the right place to be in.