This
statement may be reproduced in total or in part as considered helpful to those
who have survived and to the families of those who have not.
Because of other commitments I have not been in
a position to check all the available published material concerning the
resignation of Justice Goddard and therefore the two main points I am making
may have already been already covered.
The first is that no attention appears to have
been given to the terms of the contract which Justice Goddard agreed to sign
following the confirmation Hearing by the Home Affairs Select Committee of the House
of Commons. Below is a copy of the Contract which is available on the site of
the Inquiry page 21 of the document index under Library.
I draw attention to 16 where the standard
requirement of three months is stated. This means the resignation would have been
accepted at the commencement of May giving Mrs May plenty of opportunity to
have secured a replacement if the resignation has been submitted under 16
It therefore can be assumed that either Justice
Goddard was able to persuade Mrs May to release her because of a condition
listed in paragraph 17 or Mrs May or her successor determined that the contract
should be ended for reasons which are to remain confidential.
I will be surprised if the confidentiality
requirement 21 will enable Justice Goddard to provide the Home Affairs Select Committee
with the kind of information which the committee appears to be seeking and that
apart from the present and former Home Secretaries being asked to attend the
committee together with the Permanent Secretary I cannot see how any other
individual employed under contract for the inquiry will be able to accept an
invitation to appear or make public comment.
I have previously made the point that the
appointment of a single Judge was questionable, recommending three with a
reserve although at the time I never envisaged that there would be so many individual
Hearings or that Hearings would commence in relation matters where there were
ongoing police investigations and where it will be appreciated the Leveson Inquiry
was divided into two parts with the second still to be agreed.
I also suggest it is impractical and unlikely any
one individual can combine the task of managing the Inquiry overall with the
chairing the individual Hearings and where, as stated, those already underway
are the first tranche of what was said to be twenty-five in total covering the work
strands headed by the Chairman and individual panel members.
It is noteworthy that at the opening of the
most recent Preliminary Hearings the four other members of the Panel Inquiry
were introduced. It is not evident from the transcript of the first Preliminary
Hearings if the panel members were all present and where they were sitting. I
have been surprised at the lack of attention being given to the content of the
Hearings and the associated documentation which has been published by the
Inquiry.
The main purpose of the Inquiry was to provide
a definitive volume explaining what happened and why for each of the
institutions covered. The main requirement of the victims who have survived and
of the campaigners who supported them was that the final report answered the
questions for each Institution of State, Church and Media: Was there a cover up
which prevented prosecution and enabled further crimes to be committed, and if
so was the cover up in the National and Public Interest or to protect people
and avoid reputational damage to the Institution? The process was to be
comprehensive and thorough to bring closure on these issues.
Separately but included within the framework of
the Inquiry is the Truth project which begs the question does this mean the
Hearings are not about Truth but more about a determination of matters of fact
according to the law at the time, the matters under consideration are said to
have taken place. The Truth project is about enabling victim survivors where a
prosecution has or is not possible, of have a continuing sense of injustice about
what happened to them to tell their story including what happened to them
subsequently, and in many instances what happened to their children and to
their adult relationships, and to have their story recorded which was also an
aim of the People’s Tribunal with which I was associated for a time. The Truth project appears to have set up in
such a way that it can proceed and where the involvement of a Judge or Legal
officer is not a prerequisite unless the story is to be published or the
individual is to become a witness in a Hearing. The Truth project should also
provide sound data for establishing the quantity and quality of the ongoing
help which the institutions should provide.
Obviously if as the work of the Inquiry
progressed it became evident there were matters which should come to the attention
of Government and Parliament then the terms of reference enabled this to happen
but the notion that at the end of the Inquiry it would produce a magic solution
to end the problems involved is even more ludicrous than the expectation that
government can abolish sin.
There is need to continue to remind the words
of Frank Dobson in his forward to the government response to the review and
report of Sir William Utting People Like Us published in 1997 with the
Government response publish over a year later in 1998 as Command Paper 4105.
Among the things he said was
“This was not just a failure by care staff. The
children had been failed by social service managers, councillors, police,
schools, neighbours, the Social Services Inspectorate, Government Departments,
Ministers, and Parliament. Some people from all these categories and
institutions had worked hard to do a good job for these children but too many
did not. The whole system had failed “
He also said “Additional resources are being
made available. There can be no more excuses. “
Coinciding with the publication of the Government
response the Secretary of State for Health made a statement to the House of
Commons and which was repeated by Baroness Hayman in the House of Lords
(November 5th 1998). The present Speaker of the House of Commons
established that the £450 million being spent over 3 years was new money while
the former Secretary of State, Virginia, now Baroness Bottomley, pointed out
the problem was intractable.
What happened next also merits reminding. The
Member for Sunderland South Chris Mullin, then chaired the Home Affairs
Committee on which also sat former Prime Minister David Cameron and the present
Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Tom Watson, together with David Winnick who
remains a member of the Committee. They inquired into the conduct of
investigations into past cases of abuse in children’s homers HC 836-1 printed
22nd October 2002 and recommended that further police investigations
should not take place unless authorised by a Judge. On June 30th, a month ago, the
House of Lords passed the following motion “That this House takes note of the
case for introducing statutory guidelines relating to the investigation of
historical child abuse.” I am yet to write to those participating in the debate
in support of the need for due process standards but also reminding of the
history of cover up and protectionism
It may be coincidence that it was in the autumn
of 2012 Tom Watson asked David Cameron at PMQ’s the question which kicked off
the current level of police investigations which led to the political clamour
for an Inquiry and where the noble Lord Norman Tebbit explained on the Andrew
Marr programme the day before the Home Secretary on behalf of the Government
surrendered to the pressure for the Inquiry in 2014 that the British Way of
cover up had such disastrous results.
In January 2014 after meeting Dr Liz Davies and
Peter McKelvie and learning of their group with Tom Watson I wrote to the
Secretary of State for Education, unaware that the Home Secretary led the
Ministerial Group, supporting the government view that the first priority was
the police investigations and re-investigations and that complaints about how
the police dealt with previous allegations should be referred to the Independent
Police Complaints Commission, itself in the process of reform. I supported what
has become the Truth project and I urged the collation and securing all
relevant documentation.
At my meeting with Dr Davies and Mr McKelvie
because they mentioned excluding someone brought by Tom Watson to one of their
meetings, I believed it was appropriate to mention that I had led the
questioning of the individual during the Gates Inquiry and where I had authored
the majority report. I had not discussed or mentioned my authorship of the
report since a private meeting arranged at his request with Sir William
Utting at which he requested I wrote to
the then Secretary of State, and it was
only later in 2014 that the Spectator drew my attention to the 1993 article by Auberon
Waugh which attempted to explain the different perspectives of the two reports
and mentioned that I had authored one of the reports, although in fact the two non-lawyer colleagues had
rewritten the report given my
difficulties with the written language
and one had the brilliant idea of summarising the 100 or so instances where had different
actions and choices been made a child
may still be living.
On January 2nd 2014 I was able to
advise Dr Davies and Mr McKelvie that the individual mentioned (based solely on
that experience several decades before) was a person of great professional
integrity and therefore I was not surprised when the Home Secretary appointed
the individual to the first panel inquiry and was disappointed when the
individual did not continue to assist the subsequent Inquires.
For separate and important reasons, I provided
the main commissioning authority for the Gates Inquiry with information,
including the publication by a third party on the site Cathy Fox (not a person)
the communication prepared by a Secretary of State to then Prime Minister and
which I believe was for onward transmission to the Palace. This communication
does not contain information which was disclosed to me before the inquiry
commenced and where the Chairman in his report and I and my colleagues did not
disclose in the majority report it was not in the Public Interest to do so.
The information provided Bexley Council enable
them to determine the best approach to the request for republication of the two
reports which are available to be read at the Bexley Public Library.
To emphasise the importance of the need for a
meaningful sense of justice for victim survivors and all those directly
involved in these traumatic and life destroying events, some thirty years later
I was asked to assist one the surviving children with information who now has a
separate name, and only within the past weeks, a crucial witness contacted for
information whose life had remained affected by what happened and where I hope
I was able to bring one mind to rest.
In 1991 the Editor of a local newspaper
contacted about matters which had arisen before by appointment and which had
been verified with my predecessor. I agreed to investigate and eventually
reported what I found to the police and to the appropriate Secretary of State
through her officials and subsequently directly.
I wrote to the editor at the time after meeting
his deputy and as I repeated to the Secretary of State for Education in January
2014 that we should all be governed, particularly the media, by concern that it
what is said does not trigger or cause victims to go through what happened to them
again and again with traumatic consequences, and that we had also to be mindful
that publicity is likely to adversely affect present day children in public care.
Further it is difficult enough coping with the
realities of our individual lives, families and friends without taking on the
responsibility for coping with the difficulties of others. The child care officer
of the past as those of today have an impossible to achieve task and general
assaults on them will not help and is likely to do greater damage. When we look
into the abyss, the abyss looks into us.
However, the question also remains Who guards
the guardians? When politicians, the Government and our parliament fail to do
this then responsibility must rest with a free media.
More -
https://colinsmartone.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-resignation-of-justice-goddard.html
