Brown speaks out on forced child migration

Former PM says policy was little more than ‘government-enforced trafficking’

Gordon Brown has described the forced migration of children as a bigger sex abuse scandal than that perpetrated by Jimmy Savile.

Giving evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), Mr Brown said the mass transportation of 130,000 British children overseas amounted to “government-enforced trafficking”.

Mr Brown, who issued a national apology to migrants in 2010, told the inquiry that a Government minister should be “hauled” before it to explain why nothing has been done over new evidence of abuse that has come to light in the past seven years.

Mr Brown said he had not been aware of the scale of the abuse when he delivered his national apology in 2010.

The former prime minister said the surviving 2,000 victims of the migrant programmes, which continued until the 1970s, should be compensated as a matter of urgency.

Mr Brown said that the forced transportation programmes were a “violation of human rights”.

He said: “Clearly, successive governments have failed in a duty of care. “And that is a source of shame.” Another former prime minister, Sir John Major, did not appear in person at the inquiry, but provided a written statement which said his government took the approach that mistreatment of British children sent abroad was primarily a matter for the country concerned.

Picture: PA. Mr Brown arriving at the inquiry.