Macur Review of Historical Child Abuse

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Macur Review into historic child abuse.

Diolch yn fawr iawn, Sir Edward. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship today. I am sure we are all saddened by the news we are hearing from Brussels.

I will start by putting on record my thanks to the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) for his statement last week. I also congratulate him on his new role in government. I also congratulate the Secretary of State for Wales and the Minister on their promotions. I look forward to working constructively with both of them in what I am sure will be an eventful year. I also pay tribute to many colleagues across the House for their work, especially the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd), who I am delighted to see with us this afternoon. She has campaigned tirelessly for the victims and survivors of child abuse in Wales and beyond.

The publication of the Macur review’s report was long overdue. For the survivors of these abhorrent events, it represented hope: that they would see justice; that their accounts of events would be vindicated; that the nagging doubts and conspiracy theories would be either verified or dispelled; and that the whole would be conducted disinterestedly without fear or favour. Unfortunately, the report, which includes more than 600 redactions, adds virtually nothing to our understanding of how the state failed so many children over so many years in north Wales.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

I am sure that, like me, the hon. Lady has already had survivors contact her to say how disappointed they were. The report was their hope that there would be recognition, but all it does is leave unanswered questions still unanswered.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

I agree. It seems to have been very much a matter of process and documentation, with survivors and victims as a second consideration. I will return to that.

The report culminates in a bland list of eight conclusions, which mainly state that Waterhouse was necessary, agree with the instigation of this inquiry, say that neither is a substitute for criminal proceedings and that the experience of giving evidence is difficult for survivors. The six recommendations include the platitudes that inquiries should be “above reproach”; that evidence should not be lost; that there is no purpose in further inquiries; and about the hazards of hindsight. I will return to recommendation 5 later.

Macur was the third review of its kind after the Jillings panel and the Waterhouse tribunal. We will have to wait a further two and a half years before we learn of the findings of Goddard’s independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in particular criticised the timescale, saying that despite the “drawn out process”, the report reveals “barely anything”. It expressed concern that that might deter victims from coming forward during the ongoing Operation Pallial.

I turn to redactions: the removal of names and details by which people might be identified. On my count—I may be wrong, although I counted twice—there are 633 redactions in the report. Although many will be duplications, the Secretary of State and the Minister must appreciate that that number is extremely high. The previous Secretary of State for Wales, the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire, said in his statement last week that redactions had been “kept to a minimum”. While I, and I am sure many people here, accept that some redactions must be made, particularly given the ongoing court proceedings and the potential for further actions, I put it to the House that to claim that redactions in the report have been kept to a minimum is frankly disingenuous.

I am particularly concerned about the extremely high number of redactions in chapters 7 and 8 on freemasonry and establishment figures respectively. Lady Justice Macur made recommendations in her report to the Secretaries of State on what should be redacted in the published report. She said:

“It is for the Secretaries of State to determine any further redaction of my Report weighing public interest with the caution”.

[Albert Owen (Ynys Môn) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. One of the few positives to come out of Waterhouse was the setting up of the Children’s Commissioner for Wales. Given the strong statement that the commissioner made, does she agree that the Government must be clear about the methodology that arrived at so many redactions?

[Liz Saville Roberts]

I agree entirely. I will refer to what the Children’s Commissioner for Wales said anon and I hope that the Minister will be in a position to respond to her call as well as those we are making today.

The previous Secretary of State also said that the rationale behind making the redactions, as set out in the letters to the Secretaries of State by the Treasury Solicitor and the director general of propriety and ethics, “explain the reasons…fully”. However, I put it to the Minister that those justifications are weak and bland. I sympathise with the views expressed by victims and by the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, as just mentioned, who believe that the UK Government need to be more open about the process by which redactions were made. First, I ask the Minister to tell the House how many redactions were made in addition to those suggested by Lady Macur. Secondly, will he publish further information about why those additional redactions were made and what the process was in coming to a decision on them?

Especially alarming—possibly more so—are the numerous serious cases of missing or destroyed evidence at several different points during the various inquiries. Lady Justice Macur’s report refers to individuals who have implied in written evidence that they hold information about abusers who were not investigated by the police or the tribunal. She states that following an interview with—redacted name—she made a request for materials said by that person to be relevant to the review and stored by a solicitor. She goes on to say that that solicitor had since left the relevant practice and that the files in question were destroyed. She even says that the person at the firm dealing with her request recalled that, before the files were destroyed, the solicitor in question had visited the office and

“may have taken any documents he considered worthy of retention.”

The report states that the solicitor in question had failed to respond to correspondence from Lady Macur. Does the Minister consider that a satisfactory conclusion to that line of inquiry? Is simply ignoring correspondence until the problem goes away all one needs to do to get away with a crime? Even ignoring the allegation that the solicitor may have removed evidence, is the Minister satisfied that it would be standard practice to destroy recently archived data?

Unfortunately, that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to missing or destroyed evidence. The greatest cause for concern in relation to the process and documentation is of course the fate of the Waterhouse tribunal’s evidence originally handed over to the Welsh Office in 1998. Those documents—it says this in the report—were supposed to be archived securely for 75 years. That did not happen. The evidence received scant respect at the Welsh Office and it was then shuffled over to the Welsh Government.

This is simply a catalogue of data mismanagement: dependency on technology that becomes dated and corrupted; destruction of hardware and tapes; boxes of evidence in disorder; and a reference index that lists 718 boxes while only 398 were initially made available. It remains unclear how many boxes of evidence were finally handed over to Lady Justice Macur, but documents were still coming to light on 1 December last year. It should be noted that the report was presented on 10 December. That methodology does not instil confidence.

The significance of the destroyed computer database cannot be overestimated. That was the record of all documentation. Against that database, if extant, it would have been possible to come to a view as to whether significant evidence was present or missing. Macur states:

“It is impossible to confidently report that I have seen all the documentation that was before the Tribunal.”

We cannot therefore come empirically to an opinion on whether material has been lost, removed or concealed.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

I interviewed six young men some years ago in the Cynon Valley. Those boys were taken to north Wales, and that may be true of boys from other parts of south Wales as well. This is talked about as the north Wales abuse inquiry, but it is sometimes forgotten that the children came from all over Wales. Those boys’ reports were harrowing, as Members can imagine. It is an absolute disgrace that there are so many missing documents; I entirely agree with the hon. Lady. Where have they gone? Who is responsible? Lots of the evidence given to the Jillings report, which preceded the Waterhouse inquiry, has also gone missing. Where is it? Who did that, and what were they hiding?

[Liz Saville Roberts]

I agree. There is a history, as the right hon. Lady mentioned, of a loss of evidence associated with child abuse. I refer also to the Geoffrey Dickens dossier. I ask the Minister to consider whether victims and survivors of abuse in Wales—not only north Wales, of course—can, in all honesty, be satisfied with the findings of this report.

Now that the Macur review has been published, we are left with the overall lasting impression that documentation and process have been more important than securing justice for the victims and survivors of the abuse that was perpetrated, which should have been the overarching responsibility and purpose of the review. Symptomatic of that concern for documentation and process rather than for the victims and survivors of abuse was the failure to speak to them individually. The review held a public session in Wrexham in June 2013. The review’s website states that, on that day, Lady Justice Macur

“met privately with anyone who asked to do so”

and that the review

“met with numerous individuals with relevant information.”

However, I have spoken with one of the survivors, Keith Gregory, who is a point of contact for other victims and survivors of abuse, and he has informed me that arrangements for interviews were forgotten by the review.

Adding to the undermining of the victims and survivors of abuse are the definitions of “unreliable witnesses” and “multiple hearsay”. Those unfortunate terms were used at the time by people working within the Wales Office to dismiss those who had approached them to demand that attention be focused on investigating abuse that later turned out to be true and to be widespread. The terms are still in use today and are very potent.

It is unfortunate that, due to misguided and wild accusations that emanated from multiple investigations into prominent public figures, sympathy for the survivors and victims of historical child abuse has swung away from them to incorrectly accused individuals. Obviously, the cases of figures such as Lord Edwin Bramall and Harvey Proctor—this, of course, is relevant to news we have heard in recent days—have demonstrated the need to proceed with care and caution when investigations are carried out. However, the danger is that the popular and media perception focuses on sympathy for wronged figures at the expense of genuine victims and survivors. The sensationalist and prurient nature of the subject matter makes a good tabloid story, but surely society should make every effort to respect the suffering of all innocents caught up in both perpetration and accusation.

Ultimately, after reading the Macur review, I am left with the impression that many points still need to be explained and explored under the public gaze. I am particularly concerned about recommendation 5, which I do not interpret in the same way as the Secretary of State for Wales did in his statement last week. He referred to one alleged incident of criminal charges, but Lady Justice Macur’s recommendation seems far more wide-reaching. It concerns me that the Secretary of State appears to have been at pains to restrict the scope of recommendation 5, and I seek a further explanation of what steps will be taken.

The role of the Children’s Commissioner for Wales should be strengthened, which she mentioned in an interview on “Sunday Politics Wales” at the weekend. The commissioner, Sally Holland, called for greater powers, noting that the commissioner’s powers in relation to complaints, advocacy and whistleblowing should be extended to include any area that involves the abuse of children. Might I suggest the Government examine that point and perhaps, if appropriate, include it when they inevitably strengthen and revise the initial draft of the Wales Bill? Will the UK Government work with the Welsh Government to ensure that the Children’s Commissioner has the full range of powers she believes she needs to ensure the full and adequate protection of children?

The Children’s Commissioner also called for the Government to publish or explain information regarding who identified what number of redactions and in which chapter; that is an important point. We are aware that an unredacted copy of the review has been forwarded to the Goddard inquiry, but that will not report until the end of 2018 and will therefore be another long process for the survivors, who have waited for many years already. Victims and survivors need to know what the methodology and process for deciding upon redactions were; the Government owe them that. I note that the only politicians to have had sight of the unredacted version so far all belong to the Government. That does not seem right. It is also clear that there needs to be a strengthened status for evidence from child abuse inquiries, including its preservation, which is a wider point for any Government inquiry.

There undoubtedly needs to be a commitment to ensure that children’s voices are heard in the criminal justice system, in health and social care and in any other sector that involves the care of children and contains the potential for abuse. Rather than simply a platitude that seeks to soothe and reassure in the face of public anger and is then forgotten as time rolls on, we need to change the way in which children’s voices are heard during such processes, in concrete and administrative terms.

[Mark Tami]

The hon. Lady makes an important point about children’s voices being heard. In many of these cases, because the children were in a home, they were not considered to have any value, and that is why they were treated in the way they were. That, in some ways, is the worst aspect of this whole miserable, dreadful business.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

One thing that has saddened me is perceiving how vulnerable these children were, which made them vulnerable to abuse in the first place, and how that abuse in turn has affected them for the rest of their lives and in part condemns them to being unreliable witnesses. We have not served them well; there is no denying that.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the speech she is making. In terms of process, is she surprised, as I am, at the paucity of reference to the linguistic context in which this happened in Wales—specifically in north Wales and north-west Wales, where a percentage of the children would be Welsh-speaking? I detect very few references to that in either the Macur report or, in fact, the Waterhouse report, which I read many years ago.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

Indeed. We are talking about children’s voices, and one aspect of that is whether people are able to use their first language, in which they are most confident and express their emotions most fluently.

Finally, one critical lesson to be learned—I again echo the Children’s Commissioner for Wales—is that reviews from now on must be centred on the victims and the survivors. They should have the opportunity to advise on both the remit and process of an inquiry and should be properly supported at all stages. They, of course, are the people who live with this experience for their whole lives, and it has been a terrible experience. Diolch yn fawr iawn.