No evidence of Home Office abuse cover up, inquiry finds

The government-commissioned independent inquiry, conducted by Wanless and criminal barrister Richard Whittam QC, was ordered by the Home Secretary Theresa May after it emerged that 114 records of child abuse concerns and allegations made between 1979 and 1999 had gone missing from the Home Office.

Its report, published today, said: “We found nothing to support a concern that files had been deliberately or systematically removed or destroyed to cover up organised child abuse.

“We found nothing specific to support a concern that the Home Office had failed in any organised or deliberate way to identify and refer individual allegations of child abuse to the police.”

However, the report makes clear that it is “not possible" to say whether files were removed nor “to have concluded one way or the other whether there was organised child abuse that has yet to be fully uncovered”.

In addition, it made a number of recommendations on how the Home Office and government in general should record information about child abuse allegations. It says reports should be marked as “significant”, with this dictating how the file is handled, including its retention and when it can be destroyed.

It also called for a system to be introduced by the Home Office to record what information is sent to the police when a file has been received.  

The findings support recommendations from an earlier review into the handling of the allegations. They will also feed into the government's separate historical child sexual abuse inquiry.