Macur Review

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Crabb]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his questions. He was one of the joint commissioning Secretaries of State for the foundation of the Macur review. He asked two specific questions. The first was about the absence of the relevant documentation. The conclusion that Lady Justice Macur comes to is that she is confident she has seen enough documentation from the Waterhouse tribunal to make some strong conclusions about the overall findings that Waterhouse reached, and that she supports the overall findings of Waterhouse based on her exhaustive trawl through 1 million-plus pages of documentation. Where there are gaps, she has concluded that they are not sufficient to cast into doubt her overall findings.

My right hon. Friend’s second point related to redactions. Again I make the point that a full unredacted copy has gone to the Goddard inquiry. He asked whether Goddard would be able to pursue those names in the unredacted report. Let us bear it in mind that one of the specific recommendations of the Macur review is that the police and the judicial process will be best placed to go after those people against whom specific allegations have been made, and that public or private inquiries are not the best forum in which to do that.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

Page 300 of the Waterhouse report lists the names of 13 young men who could not give evidence to the new review because they had lost their lives. Most of them took their own lives following the case, when they appeared before those who had been accused. They were all used to give evidence in court, some of them because of their police backgrounds. The victims were mercilessly torn to shreds and several of them took their own lives as a direct consequence of the abuse being continued by our court system. That is still continuing today. What this report covers would not have been revealed were it not for the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) and Bruce Kennedy and Paddy French, journalists at HTV. It is difficult to judge the report before giving it full consideration, but this is a heart-breaking story of abuse. Those who were responsible were laughing as they went away from court, and the lives of innocents were ended prematurely. We still need to look further into the matter and to consider carefully why some names are still redacted. Is this historical abuse continuing?

[Stephen Crabb]

The hon. Gentleman is exactly right. We are talking about heinous, horrific acts of abuse. We are talking about children who were in the care of the state and got anything but the care of the state. It is a long and tragic sequence of events. Of course, today’s report will not bring full closure to absolutely everybody who lived through those experiences, but Lady Justice Macur has been thorough and diligent in her task of trawling through all the paperwork of the Waterhouse inquiry to try to make sense of whether victims got a fair shout and whether questions about nationally prominent individuals, further paedophile rings, and the role of freemasonry were addressed appropriately. I encourage all hon. Members with an interest in the matter to read the report in full and to reflect on its conclusions.

As for continuing the investigation of those who are guilty, let me be clear that there are people walking around in north Wales and elsewhere in the United Kingdom right now who were there at the time, who participated in and witnessed these acts, and who have gone for years thinking that they are untouchable. I hope that the summary of the achievements of Operation Pallial that I read out earlier demonstrated that such people should be looking over their shoulders.