Sex abuse dossier given to Brittan is ‘ lost for good’
AN INQUIRY into how the Home Office dealt with historic child sex abuse claims at Westminster has been ‘set up to fail’, says an MP.
And a thorough search of the Home Office has failed to find any sign of the ‘Dickens dossier’, which was handed to former Home Secretary Leon Brittan.
There are fears the dossier is one of 114 files that may have been lost or destroyed.
Home Secretary Theresa May appointed NSPCC chief executive Peter Wanless to investigate concerns that her department did not act on information about paedophiles in high places passed on by Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in the 1980s.
Mr Wanless’s report – out next week – is expected to criticise the department’s archiving in the 1980s and 1990s.
Now Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for rochdale who campaigns against historic child abuse, has said the review was never going to succeed because of obstruction by Home Office officials.
in July, Mr Danczuk triggered the inquiry by calling on Lord Brittan to say what he knew about paedophile allegations passed to him in the 1980s.
‘i am worried Peter Wanless has been set up to fail in many
‘He was set up to fail’
respects,’ Mr Danczuk said. ‘i don’t think he was provided with enough support within the Home Office.
‘i don’t think he was given enough time to carry out this investigation. i don’t think he was provided with enough support within the Home Office and i am worried he didn’t get the technological support.
‘i think there are some fairly sophisticated forensic techniques that could have been used to establish what documents were available over a 20year period and i don’t think he has been given the opportunity to get to the documents.’
The Home Office said only that the report of the Wanless review is to be published next week.
A source told the BBC’s Newsnight: ‘They have looked inside and behind every single cupboard in the department, and they have been round them twice, and they have not been able to find any of them.’
Lord Brittan has flatly denied failing to deal properly with the dossier provided by Mr Dickens in 1983, while a review last year found no evidence that relevant material was not passed to other authorities.
The latest developments come after Mrs May apologised over the resignation of the second chairman appointed to lead a wider inquiry into historic child sex abuse. Fiona Woolf, the Lord Mayor of London, resigned after disclosures about her links to Lord Brittan.