UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Editorial
If it were less important for the victims and survivors of abuse, the tale of the biggest and most costly statutory inquiry ever launched would be a farce. But the scale of the responsibility of the independent inquiry into the institutional failure that allowed thousands of children to be abused over decades leached the humour from this afternoon’s Commons home affairs committee session with permanent secretary Mark Sedwill. After an hour of parrying and blocking MPs’ questions it felt damagingly like a high grade version of the institutional cover-ups that victims and survivors of abuse want the inquiry to expose.
Mr Sedwill was in an impossible position. The more he tried to argue that the independence of the inquiry into historic child abuse meant he could not know what was going on, the harder it was to understand why he had met the former chair, Dame Lowell Goddard, on at least two occasions. It was even more confusing that a member of the panel with which Dame Lowell was supposed to be working, Drusilla Sharpling, had actually raised her concerns with the Home Office in April this year, several months before Dame Lowell’s abrupt resignation in August.
The permanent secretary is impaled on the relationship between the inquiry, with its budget of £17m, and its sponsoring department, the Home Office. In a manner that must have appeared suspiciously opaque to victims and survivors of abuse, he tried to explain how an arm’s-length relationship can coexist alongside the home secretary’s power to hire and fire the inquiry’s chair. To those forgiving of the ways of Whitehall, this is an everyday expression of the kind of arrangement that keeps the bureaucracy moving; Mr Sedwill said the Home Office was insulated from the inquiry by an air gap. To the lay observer, it seems incomprehensible that the department, which has supplied a fifth of the inquiry’s staff, would not have got wind of the troubles at the top that led within weeks not only to the resignation of Dame Lowell, the third chair to exit unexpectedly, but also the departure of the inquiry’s counsel, Ben Emmerson QC, and its junior counsel, Elizabeth Prochaska.
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