Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps his Department has taken to locate the 114 documents in relation to child sexual abuse and hon. Members which were misplaced by his Department.

In February 2013, the Permanent Secretary commissioned an investigation into information the Home Office received in relation to child abuse allegations, between 1979 and 1999. That investigation was unable to locate 114 potentially relevant Home Office files.

On 7 July 2014 the Home Secretary appointed Peter Wanless and Richard Whittam QC to carry out an independent review of the 2013 investigation.

On 29 July 2014, the Home Office Permanent Secretary directed that a physical search targeted on specific areas of the Department be undertaken to see if any of the 114 missing files could be located. This did not uncover any of the 114 missing files, though one was found prior to this exercise. As part of their Review, Wanless and Whittam interrogated what was known about each of the 114 files. They published their analysis within their final report, published November 2014.