Abuse survivors want law change

There were fresh calls for a change to the law on double jeopardy last night, after a new film laid bare how close one of football’s most prolific paedophiles came to getting away with his crimes.

Child sexual abuse survivors, MPS and leading lawyers urged the Government to review legislation that prevented Bob Higgins being retried for sexually assaulting six Southampton schoolboys.

The airing of the second part of a BBC film, Football’s Darkest Secret, documents the sport’s worst scandal and survivors’ fight for justice. The programme showed how Higgins was acquitted of abusing six players in the early 1990s before going on to offend at Peterborough United.

Higgins, jailed in 2019 for 24 years for molesting 24 schoolboys, cannot be retried for assaulting the original Southampton six, despite only one of their cases – that of Dean Radford

– being heard in court in 1991 before collapsing. The injustice prompted Radford to launch a public campaign to change the law.

Radford told The Daily Telegraph the law was “completely wrong”. “There’s no reason or advantage to keep it. It’s 300 years old and needs changing.”

Sarah Champion, the MP for Rotherham and former chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse, said: “The Government must legislate to extend the list of offences exempt from double jeopardy law to include all offences relating to child sexual abuse.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “The Court of Appeal can order the retrial of somebody who has been acquitted of certain exceptionally grave offences, including murder and rape, if compelling new evidence comes to light.”