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Home Office handling of MP's abuse claim to be reviewed | |
(about 3 hours later) | |
A senior legal figure is to review how the Home Office handled an MP's claims of child sex abuse at Westminster in the 1980s and 1990s. | |
The new inquiry will assess whether a 2013 report on the claims was sound. | |
It follows fresh questions about what happened to material handed to the then home secretary, Leon Brittan, who says he gave it to officials. | |
It has also emerged that four cases of historic sex abuse were referred to the police following last year's report. | |
Home Office permanent secretary Mark Sedwill has written to the prime minister to inform him of the plans to appoint a senior independent legal figure. | |
It comes after David Cameron asked him to "find answers" about what happened to the material supplied by Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens. | |
The abuse claims were passed in the 1980s by Mr Dickens to Lord Brittan, who says he in turn handed them to officials. | |
Lord Brittan has since been criticised for his handling of that material. | |
An investigation conducted by the Home Office last year concluded that the "credible" elements of the claims with "realistic potential" for further investigation were passed to prosecutors and the police. | |
It found that other elements were either "not retained or destroyed". | |
'Reassurance' | |
A letter from Lord Brittan to Mr Dickens was also found during the review, in which he said that the allegations had been acted on. | |
In a letter to the prime minister, Mr Sedwill wrote that he would appoint a senior independent legal figure within the next week to assess the conclusions of that investigation. | |
He said this was to provide "additional reassurance" about the investigation last year, given that information was now in the public domain. | |
The Home Office has faced calls to explain why the material was not "retained" by officials. | |
Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said the prime minister should "demand a proper investigation into the allegations of child abuse not being acted upon by the Home Office". | |
Labour leader Ed Miliband said the department needed a "serious review" because "we need to understand what happened" to the information. | |
"All of these kind of allegations must be taken very seriously," he said. | |
No 10 rejected calls for a public inquiry into child sex abuse claims, but the prime minister said it was "right" to make investigations. | |
In a letter to MP Keith Vaz, Mr Sedwill wrote that the Home Office investigation did not find a single dossier from Mr Dickens, but rather several sets of correspondence over a number of years containing claims of sexual offences as well as references to broader issues. | |
'Occult activities' | |
This included "action taken regarding the import of pornographic material reported in some of the media this week," Mr Sedwill wrote. | |
"As well as these specific allegations, later correspondence from Mr Dickens focused on broader related policy issues, such as the risk of children and young people being drawn into occult activities. | |
"The review found no record of specific allegations by Mr Dickens of child sex abuse by prominent public figures." | |
The Home Office investigation identified 13 items of information about alleged child abuse. | |
Nine of those 13 were known or reported to the police, including four cases involving Home Office staff, Mr Sedwill said. | |
The remaining four items, which had not been previously disclosed, have since been passed to police. | |
Former minister David Mellor said there had been a "witch hunt" surrounding the handling of the so-called dossier. | |
Mr Mellor, who served under Lord Brittan as a home office minister in the 1980s, said the former home secretary was being unfairly "pilloried". | |
He said the material was spoken of within the department at the time, but it was "not a very substantive thing at all". | |
"People are talking about this document as if it's a carefully worked through expose of people. There's no reason to think it was," he said on his LBC radio show. | |
Mr Mellor rejected criticisms over the way Lord Brittan dealt with the document. | |
"I think it is so unfair that on the basis of what is becoming a witch hunt, he's being pilloried for handling a document... that he did pass on," he said. |