Monday 3 November 2014

Who conducted the review before the Wanless/Whittam Review?

Last year Mark Sedwill, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, commissioned a review of the files which are often referred to loosely as the Dickens Dossier.

The review looked into what files existed and in the end (and more importantly) identified that some 114 files were missing.

Theresa May promised "maximum transparency". She hasn't delivered on that promise.

Some time ago I asked if the anonymous investigator was a member of the security services:
Child abuse: Was the Home Office-commissioned "investigator" a member of the Security Services?

We still don't know. In the interests of transparency we should be told.

Also we still don't know who the investigator was. Is he trustworthy? We don't know.

We can assume that the Home Office thought him/her a safe pair of hands. But the Home Office thought that Butler-Sloss and Woolf were a safe pair of hands and look how that ended up.

We don't know which organisation the anonymous investigator worked for. That should be disclosed.

Just how "independent" was the investigator? We don't know.

Was he/she as "independent" as the preparation of Fiona Woolf's letter to Theresa May? We are not told.

The only credible course for the Home Office is total transparency.

If the anonymous investigator could have had potential conflicts of interest then we need to be told the facts to let us make up our own minds.

It is ridiculous for Mark Sedwill to take the approach "We're the Home Office. Just trust us.".

Those days of naive trust in the Home Office are gone.

Nothing less than total transparency will do.

No comments:

Post a Comment