Historical Child Sex Abuse

Lord Dear Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dear (CB)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to speak in support of the Motion proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, which, as noble Lords will already have concluded, identifies a number of serious fundamental failures in our current system. First, I turn to the case of Field Marshal Lord Bramall. All of us will remember him as a Member of this House until his retirement two years or so ago. I remained close to him during the problems that arose as a result of his investigation. I should put on record that I was able to advise him constantly during that period and to give advice, when it was necessary, to his legal team. As such, I saw the unhappy case from the inside, from a particularly privileged position. As far as I am concerned, that investigation was mishandled from the very beginning. There was only one complainant: the man who is referred to under the nom de plume of Nick. There was no corroboration to Nick at the time, or indeed since. There was no early check made on the veracity of Nick. Checks that were carried out some time later indicated that his evidence was likely to be flawed; indeed, it is on record that some referred to him as a fantasist.

Of course, it is a matter of record, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has already identified, that there is a very heavy duty on the police to investigate cases of this sort. Indeed, it was always Lord Bramall’s position that he expected nothing less. He did not seek preferential treatment at any stage, despite his staggeringly well-known record in public life. But when it comes to carrying out an investigation, it surely is totally inappropriate to turn up at his house in a small market town with marked police cars, with 20—no less—officers in white scenes of crime suits to carry out a search of his property, in a blaze of publicity. I shall mention publicity in another context in a moment.

At that time Lord Bramall put forward the names of a number of his staff who were serving with him at the time that the allegations concerned—drivers, secretaries, staff officers, protection officers and so on—all of whom could have spoken in some detail about where he had been and whether it was possible for him to have committed those offences. Those interviews were not carried out for something like five months after he first put that information before the police. The inquiry dragged on, as we all know, for around 10 months. It could have been—indeed, I contend it should have been—terminated at around the three-month point. Eventually a file was put to the DPP to review the evidence. I can say without any fear of contradiction that there was no evidence other than the one allegation made by the man, Nick, and, as we know, there was no apology for a very long time, until one was dragged out in a very tardy fashion. He was, in effect, put on a hook as bait for others to come forward and say, “Yes, me too”.

I use the words “bait on a hook” because that is exactly how Sir Cliff Richard has described his experience in recent weeks. It was a different force—South Yorkshire Police—and I know little about that case, other than what I have read in the newspapers, and therefore have no personal inside knowledge of that investigation, except to say that it has a marked similarity to the Bramall case, almost holding up a mirror, as it were. There was the blaze of publicity that we all remember when Sir Cliff Richard’s house was photographed from a helicopter, with cameras from television companies, and a two-and-a-half-year inquiry. Again, as he put it, eventually the bait—him—was reeled in due to insufficient evidence. I would think that almost certainly there was no evidence other than the one complaint. Frankly, this is not good enough.

Sexual assault is a very serious allegation. When it involves minors, it becomes more serious and the duty on the police to investigate becomes even more pressing. But there is a fundamental principle that the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has already identified—the need to preserve the legal tenet that you are innocent until proven guilty—which requires the investigators to hold the whole situation in balance. Until I realised that the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, was going to speak, I was going to identify some of the circumstances concerning the investigation of Sir Edward Heath. I understand that he will speak to that later. All I will say at this stage is that I fully concur with what I believe he is going to say: in that instance I do not believe that the actions of Wiltshire Police were either proportionate or appropriate.

It is not only the police that I would take a stick to on this occasion; the case of Bishop George Bell has already been mentioned. Here I claim some sort of inside knowledge, in that I too am a member of the George Bell group. As the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has already told your Lordships, it is a group comprising senior figures from the Church of England, Members of the House of Lords and of Parliament, historians, investigative journalists and two QCs. I should perhaps ask your Lordships to note that those two QCs are, in one case, a retired judge, and in the other a man who was until recently the chairman of the Bar of England and Wales. So they are no slouches so far as the investigation of evidence is concerned.

Bell has been dead for around 60 years and the group is very concerned that there is apparently only one complainant, a lady named as Carol under a nom de plume. We believe that if she was indeed assaulted, it could not have been by Bell. All the geography, the timing and so on speaks very clearly: it points to the activities of a cleric who may well have been occupying the nearby theological college, next to the Bishop’s Palace. It seems to the group that there is a huge problem here, which the Church of England has not identified. As your Lordships have already heard, in the last few days the House of Bishops has launched an inquiry, which I understand is standard procedure when a bishop is involved in allegations of this sort.

I go back to a statement made by the Church of England on 22 October last year. In my considered opinion, that statement was slippery. The public were assured that the process of inquiry had been thorough; it was not. The allegation was presented as something very solid indeed; it is not. The statement actively incited a public judgment of guilt while allowing the Church room for manoeuvre. I would contend that that, at the best, is disingenuous. Nothing about the actual process was exposed to public scrutiny. There was complete silence as to how the decisions were reached. The independent experts, as they were called by the Church of England, were then and remain anonymous. No one has been left in a position to judge their authority and the statement on 22 October did not acknowledge the true legal standing of those reports. At that time, it quoted at length the complainant’s solicitor’s view and that of the Bishop of Chichester, both of whom were treating the allegation as proven.

Since that time, as has already been alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, the Church has refused to answer questions because it insists that there is a legal requirement of silence. Both the eminent QCs in our group have challenged that view. The Church has refused to answer questions because, it says, it would compromise the complainant; but the complainant herself, under anonymity, has undermined that by giving interviews to the press. It has refused to answer questions because of the impending Goddard inquiry; but that view is undermined by a spokesman for that inquiry who said—I paraphrase—that, “The case of Bell will be nothing to do with us”. So we face a body which, on this occasion, is simply unaccountable and deeply resentful of the most authoritative external criticism. It has misrepresented the arguments of its critics, rather than face up to them squarely, and provided absolutely no information about its processes or identified those responsible for them despite the fact that the reputation of a significant figure has virtually been trashed.

I turn back to the statement saying that we can expect an investigation into this by the Church itself. A diocesan spokeswoman has said:

“There is absolutely no suggestion that this review is about what decision was made”.

So if we are going to look not at the decision but at the process, it seems to me—I shall be interested to know what view is expressed later—that there is a grave doubt whether the same players will be marking their own homework. Quite clearly, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, said, the reviewer—the chairman of the review body—needs to have legal experience. It is no good having somebody who was involved in that process also involved in a review of what they themselves had conducted earlier.

I return very quickly to the problems that I identified in the Bramall case. There was clearly a lack of leadership and an overreliance on management procedures in that example. Only 10 or 12 years ago, shortcomings like that would have been identified, first of all, in the Police Staff College by changing the curriculum and insisting on different procedures being followed. However, we cannot look to the Police Staff College any longer, because it has been sold by the Home Office and there is nothing in its place. We would have expected, 10 or 12 years ago, advice perhaps to have come from the Home Office in the form of what were then called Home Office circulars—advice to all the police forces in the country, which was really quite powerful. That sort of advice has now been delegated to police and crime commissioners. The College of Policing—different from the Police Staff College—is embryonic and so far has not produced anything which is particularly convincing.

As a result, with no Home Office overview and instead the device of looking towards chief constables and PCCs, who are understandably preoccupied with local issues, the only overview that one seems to detect from the Home Office is value for money and collaboration agreements which lead to it—and not an interest, I should say, of any great depth in national standards of recruitment, training and, particularly, procedures.

That being the case, it gives me great pleasure to support the Motion put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, and to congratulate him on securing this time. I reflect on the fact that we are here to protect the complainant and the accused together and that there is a very strong case for a code of conduct—whether it be statutory or persuasive matters not, so long as it is powerful—that will bear on this issue and the quasi-judicial bodies that would be encompassed within it, for example the Church.

In conclusion, I say only that it seems we have lurched as a society from the extremities of the mishandling of the Savile case into the extremes identified in the current cases, and we need to put the balance point back where it belongs.