Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Lord has said what he said. I have heard it and do not agree with much of it. The Prime Minister has a strong record, as DPP and as a political leader, of tackling this issue, and a strong record of supporting my honourable friend Jess Phillips, who has a strong record of tackling this issue. Why this is being politicised is that some people are using it to attack the Government for a range of reasons. I want to focus on the issue at hand, and that is how we prevent child sexual abuse. The measures in the recommendations of the report to date will be looked at. We have already said what we are going to try to implement, and that is the important thing to focus on.

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, one of the issues that arises in this long and sad saga is the difficulty of arriving at truth and the associated possibility of false accusation. Indeed, the IICSA inquiry was set up in the first place on, in one sense, a false premise—a whole load of utterly untrue accusations against prominent people. That was why it began. Operation Midland showed the accusations against Ted Heath, Lord Bramall and Lord Brittan to be absolutely untrue. There are many such occasions on which false accusations are made.

The reason this is relevant is that, first of all, it is a terrible thing to accuse people falsely, and, secondly, it can produce an extraordinary waste of time, effort and money, instead of finding out what really is true. In this respect, I very much endorse what the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said about mandatory reporting. We need to work out what it would actually do and what effect it would have. It is proposed by Professor Jay in the IICSA recommendations, where she says that, on the disclosure of child abuse, reporting is mandatory. But what is the disclosure of child abuse? Is it simply somebody saying that somebody has behaved badly? Is it a direct accusation? Does it exonerate the person receiving that from investigating themselves and thinking hard about it? Do they exercise judgment? Are they just complying rather than exercising their conscience? These are serious questions that need to be asked about this subject.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am conscious of the time, but I will try to give the noble Lord a response to that. On mandatory reporting, we are focusing on two specific issues. First, if a person, whoever that person is—a teacher, social worker, police officer or whoever—has a disclosure from a victim to them, they have a mandatory duty to feed that in to the law enforcement agencies for investigation. That creates a dynamic, first and foremost, that if a child goes to an adult who is in a responsible position and says, “I have been abused”, the adult does not make the judgment of “Yes, you have” or “No, you haven’t”, the adult says, “I have to report that now to an appropriate authority”. Secondly, and this is a more difficult side of this case, if somebody who has committed abuse goes to their MP and says that—I had a case once where that happened to me as a Member of Parliament—or they go to a priest or another individual and confess to a crime, they also have the statutory duty to report the issue to the authority at hand.

I think that is an important issue. It is about disclosure, it is about action. I withdraw what I said about the priest: I may have overstepped the mark there, and I wish to keep the House embedded in truth and fact. The essential point is that if an individual—a child or an abuser—reports that, the person they report it to has the ability to disclose that information to the police, who will then investigate and action it accordingly. I think that will help a dynamic of reporting and surfacing of information. I note the noble Lord’s points on historical abuse. We have had much discussion in this House, and I am willing to have further discussion accordingly when it is raised.