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IICSA has failed

It must now be acknowledged that the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse (IICSA) has been a failure.

It ran for seven years, cost £180 million and produced nineteen investigation reports and twenty-five research reports totalling about 6,000 pages. The final report was 468 pages and contained twenty recommendations for government to act on. Much of it was extremely grim reading, describing unimaginable suffering endured by far too many children.

But, as of the present date, exactly three years since the IICSA final report was issued, the sum total of the IICSA recommendations implemented is … precisely zero.

How have we reached this sorry situation?

It didn’t help that between the commissioning of the inquiry and its final report, we had three changes of Prime Minister, and we have had a further two changes of Prime Minister since the report was issued. Governments often don’t feel bound by the promises of their predecessors to act on the recommendations of inquiries. That might be felt a bit unlucky, but the fact is that the average Prime Minister lasts about four years in office and the inquiry ran for seven years before producing its recommendations. So the inquiry just took too long. Several of the recommendations were blindingly obvious and could have been included in interim reports issued along the way.

It also didn’t help that the inquiry came at a time of acute political instability when politicians (at least in their own minds) had more important things to think about.

But the inquiry made things worse for itself in other ways. On the day the report was published, inquiry chair Professor Alexis Jay identified three recommendations as being of critical importance. They were the appointment of a cabinet-level Minister for Children, the setting up of Child Protection Authorities for England and Wales, and Mandatory Reporting of child sex abuse.

The Minister for Children recommendation was essentially useless. The recommendation did not state what responsibilities the new Minister should take, or how these responsibilities and the civil servants fulfilling them would be transferred from other departments. Without a clear template for the transfer of responsibilities, and a clear description of what benefits would occur as a result, there’s very little reason for government to attempt to implement this.

The Child Protection Authorities (CPA) recommendation was similarly confused and incomplete. The aim was for the CPAs to improve practice in child protection, provide advice and make recommendations to government in relation to child protection policy and reform to improve child protection, and inspect institutions and settings as it considers necessary and proportionate. It was also expected that they would also “monitor the implementation of the Inquiry’s recommendations”. But they haven’t been set up. What happened?

As the report said “Responsibility for monitoring and implementing institutional child protection lies with several statutory agencies and services, sector-specific inspectorates and government departments.” But again the report was not specific on how these responsibilities would be transferred into the new body. The report stated that the current inspection framework “fails to provide an adequate model for the external scrutiny of child protection in institutions”, and explained why.

But the IICSA proposal was for this new body to carry out inspections in parallel with existing inspectorates, giving rise to the quite obvious risk that a setting would be inspected by two different bodies against conflicting sets of requirements and genuinely be unable to fulfil both sets of requirements at once.

Worse still, the report stated that “it is not intended that the CPAs will have powers to regulate an institution by, for example, imposing a sanction for failure to implement improvements … The public exposure of failings in any report is envisaged to be sufficient to bring about the necessary changes.” That is just unbelievably naïve to anyone with experience of institutions dragging their feet over safeguarding changes.

If the existing inspectorates are not up to the job, then the recommendation should have been for them to be replaced with a specialist inspectorate with statutory powers to require changes and to impose sanctions on individuals and institutions who do not meet their requirements. But this was not proposed.

Mandatory Reporting should have been the easiest of the three recommendations to make and the hardest for government to wriggle out of. We already have laws implementing mandatory reporting of suspicions of bribery, money laundering, and financial activity related to terrorism. About 80% of jurisdictions worldwide have mandatory reporting laws relating to child sex abuse. There are plenty of models to choose from, and clear evidence that well-designed mandatory reporting is highly effective in combatting child sex abuse.

But again the IICSA report was confused. It spent several paragraphs describing the need for mandatory reporting, specifically of suspected abuse as well as disclosures by children (because disclosures either by perpetrators or children are relatively rare), and made it clear that nothing less than a criminal sanction for non-reporting of suspected abuse would change people’s behaviour.

But then the report completely undermined its own reasoning by saying “identifying indicators of abuse is more complicated than witnessing or receiving a disclosure of child sexual abuse and so a failure in respect of this aspect of the duty should not attract a criminal sanction”, and gave no further explanation why it had reached this conclusion. As a result, IICSA proposed a model of mandatory reporting that nobody else in the entire world uses.

The inquiry should have stood by its reasoning and recommended mandatory reporting for reasonably grounded suspicions of abuse, just as we already have for bribery and money laundering in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2003. Furthermore, the inquiry was absolutely full of experienced lawyers, so they should easily have been able to come up with some draft legislative wording that would implement what they wanted, and would have given government no option to water down the requirement.

But watering down is what has happened. The Crime and Policing Bill currently going through Parliament includes a “duty to report” disclosures (but not other suspicions) of child sex abuse but with no criminal sanction for non-reporting. Instead it is hoped that persons unstated will refer non-reporters to the Disclosure and Barring Service. But nobody has to do that either. There is a criminal offence of “preventing or deterring” someone from making a required report, but the description of the offence is such that it is permissible to persuade a person to delay making a report, without limit of time. It’s going to have no effect on the prevalence of abuse.

Finally, the inquiry provided no means by which governments could be monitored on their performance against the recommendations.  It issued its report and then shut up shop. In doing so, it has demonstrated with startling clarity that it is not enough to try and shame people into doing the right thing merely by a one-off dose of adverse publicity. More tangible forms of pressure are needed.

But that lesson was not learned either in its recommendations nor in how the inquiry wound itself up. It has comprehensively failed.

October 22nd, 2025|

Churches will be unaffected by the new “Duty to Report” Child Sex Abuse

The Bishop of Manchester this week has been arguing in Parliament in favour of an exemption from the “Duty to report” child sex abuse for disclosures of abuse heard during confession. He seems to think that keeping secrets is a higher moral duty than protecting children from abuse.

Other mandatory reporting duties have been introduced in the past. For instance a mandatory duty to report suspected money laundering is in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. A duty to report certain crimes related to terrorist activity is in the Terrorism Act 2000. In neither case did the churches make any argument in favour of an exemption for confession, even though in these two cases failing to make a required report is actually a criminal offence and the non-reporter could go to prison for it.

One has to wonder why the churches are so interested in carving out an exemption for themselves specifically on child sex abuse, when they couldn’t be bothered to ask on these other topics which have been in law for more than 20 years without causing the churches any noticeable spiritual inconvenience.

But in fact, the Bishop of Manchester’s concerns are misguided for an entirely different reason. Any organisation which decides for religious or any other reasons to protect those who don’t report child sex abuse can do so with complete impunity.

Under the new bill, it’s not an offence not to report child sex abuse. So unlike money laundering or terrorism, nobody is going to jail for not reporting abuse.

The government has said that non-reporters may be subject to the sanction of being referred to the DBS. But DBS referrals don’t happen by magic, they have to be made by specific people. And under the new “duty to report” in this Bill, the only person who can refer a non-reporter is their employer.

Under the bill, the employer must refer someone to the DBS for non-reporting if they first either sack them or move them away from child-facing duties because of the failure to report. It will be an offence not to make a referral in this specific circumstance. But if the employer chooses to leave the non-reporter in their job, they legally can’t make a DBS referral, and there is absolutely nothing anybody else can do about it.

So the churches can simply have an unwritten policy that they aren’t going to sack anyone for not reporting abuse heard in confession (or for that matter nor reporting abuse heard at any other time), and therefore they legally can’t make a DBS referral about, and nobody can force them to change their policy.

Of course, this doesn’t apply just to churches. Any organisation can have this policy for any reason, and nobody can prevent them. This bill is not designed to help children.

April 25th, 2025|

Amendments to the Policing and Crime Bill 2025 that would make the Mandatory Reporting chapter an effective piece of legislation

At present the government’s “mandatory reporting” section of the bill is designed NOT to help abused children. These are some amendments which would convert it into an effective piece of legislation

Amendment

Replace Section 45(1) with the following text

  • A person aged 18 or over must make a notification under this section if, in the course of engaging in a relevant activity in England or Wales, they
    • know or suspect, or
    • have reasonable grounds for knowing or suspecting,

that a child sex offence may have been committed (at any time).

Delete Section 47

Reason: For the duty to report to apply to suspicions and all reasonable grounds for suspicion that a child sex abuse offence has been committed, using wording similar to that which exists for instance in Section 330 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 relating to the mandatory duty on certain persons to report suspected money laundering.

For the duty to apply to Wales as well as England.

A court, when deciding whether a person has reasonable grounds for knowing or suspecting child sex abuse, can take into account any published statutory guidance on the subject, documents such as “Working Together to Safeguard Children” and “Keeping Children Safe in Education”.

Amendment

Delete Section 45(5)

Amend Section 45(2)(c) to it reads as follows

(c)         must be made as soon as practicable (subject to subsection (6));

Reason: Statutory guidance already recommends that a report is made as soon as practicable, and does not allow for a delay as described in Section 45(5), particularly in circumstances where there is a risk to the life or safety of a relevant child. Specifically, Keeping Children Safe in Education (2025). Page 93, para 366 states:

The initial response to an allegation.

Where the school or college identifies that a child has been harmed, that there may be an immediate risk of harm to a child or if the situation is an emergency, they should contact local authority children’s social care and as appropriate the police immediately as per the processes explained in Part one of this guidance.

There is no justification for making a statutory provision for a delay in such emergency circumstances.

Amendment

Insert the following subsections into Section 45.

(9a)      A person commits an offence if they fail to fulfil the duty under subsection (1).

(9b)      A person who commits an offence under this subsection (9a) is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 5 of the standard scale.

Delete Section 54(2)

Reason: To introduce a criminal sanction for failure to fulfil the duty to report child sexual abuse, as recommended in Recommendation 13 of the IICSA final report, replacing the provision to require a DBS referral in certain circumstances.

Amendment

Insert the following subsections into Section 45.

(9c)      A person who causes or threatens to cause any detriment to a person placed under the duty to report pursuant to subsection (1), or to another person, either wholly or partly related to the mandated person’s actual or intended provision of a report under this Act, is guilty of  an offence.

(9d)      Detriment includes any personal, social, economic, professional, or other detriment to the person.

(9e)      A person guilty of an offence under Subsection (9c) is liable on summary conviction to a level 4 fine on the standard scale.

Reason: To protect mandated reporters from retaliation, by introducing a criminal offence of threatening or causing any detriment to a mandated reporter related to the act of reporting.

Amendment

In Section 52, delete subsections (2) and (3)

Reason: Beyond the “initial 7-day period” described in section 45(11), there is no justification for anybody attempting to persuade a person to delay making a report under section 45.

Amendment

In Section 45, add subsection (1a) as follows)

(1a)      The duty under subsection (1) only applies if

  • the person has regular unsupervised contact with one or more children, or
  • the person acts in a supervisory or leadership capacity over other persons who have regular unsupervised contact with one or more children.

Reason: To ensure that persons within the leadership or an organisation providing relevant activities are covered by the duty to report, and to ensure that persons within an organisation which engages in relevant activities but themselves do not supervise children (e.g. cleaning or catering staff) are not subject to the duty.

Amendment (only to be considered if the amendments to insert Sections 45(1b), (9a) and (9b) are passed, will be withdrawn otherwise)

Delete Section 52

Reason: If the duty to report, backed by a criminal sanction, applies equally to the leadership of organisations providing relevant activities as well as to those directly caring for children, there is no need for the separate offence of preventing or deterring a report.

Amendment

Add Subsection 49 (3) (c) as follows

(c)         the age difference among all the persons involved, from the youngest to the oldest, is no more than two years.

Reason: The difference in maturity between a child who has just reached the age of 13 and one who is almost 18 is very great, and there is a serious reason to be concerned about the degree of consent given by the younger child in such circumstances. Therefore it is appropriate to limit the age difference for this exemption to the reporting duty.

Amendment

Amend Section 50 (1) (b) (i) to read

(i)          A is a child aged 13 or over, and

Reason: To  ensure that the exemption from reporting certain disclosures by children applies only to disclosures by children aged 13 or over.

 

April 6th, 2025|

The govt’s “mandatory reporting” bill is designed NOT to help abused children

The Labour government’s “mandatory reporting” section of the Crime and Policing Bill is designed to achieve nothing. It’s certainly NOT intended to help abused children.

We know this because of two things.

  1. It’s an almost word-for-word copy of the bill the Conservatives brought forward just before the general election, and
  2. The Conservatives published a document saying what effect it would have (almost zero).

Let’s start with the word-for-word copy bit. Here is a side-by-side comparison of the two measures.

On the left are the amendments proposed by the Conservatives to their Criminal Justice Bill. It didn’t pass last year because the general election.

On the right are clauses 45 to 54 and Schedule 7 of the Crime and Policing Bill. In the key parts, they are word-for-word identical.

The Conservative bill followed two rounds of public consultation. At the end of the second round, they published their preferred approach, i.e. for the duty to report abuse not to an offence with a criminal sanction (which is what the IICSA public inquiry recommended), and for there to be on offence of “Preventing or deterring” someone from making a report.

When the Conservative amendments were published, we explained why they were useless. This was the actual intention of the Conservative government! Along with the outcome of the consultation, they published an Impact Assessment Statement. The key part of it was Table 1.

A close-up of a report AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The central estimate is that there are about 103,000 child sex abuse reports to the police per year, and this measure will increase that number by just 310. That is about one per year for each local authority in England. It’s nothing.

Labour has copied a Conservative Bill designed to achieve nothing. The only reason to support this measure is if you don’t want to protect children who are being sexually abused.

To convert the bill into an effective mandatory reporting measure, here are some amendments that would make a difference.

April 4th, 2025|

The worst places for safeguarding will by unaffected by Labour’s law

The places with the very worst safeguarding culture will be entirely unaffected by the government’s new “mandatory reporting” law. This is why.

There’s no criminal sanction for non-reporting.

The government makes a lot of the fact that someone failing to report might be referred to the DBS. That referral is done by the non-reporter’s own employer, and only if they sack the person first.

But at the worst settings, they are more likely to reward a nonreporter than sack them. If they don’t sack them, they don’t have to make a DBS referral. Simples!

So the DBS mechanism is entirely ineffective in the places with the worst safeguarding culture.

Preventing or deterring a person from complying with duty to report suspected child sex offence

Then there is the offence of “Preventing or deterring a person from complying with duty to report suspected child sex offence”. It has a huge loophole. It remains perfectly legal to persuade someone to delay reporting child sex abuse. there is no limit to the duration of the delay.

But even without that loophole, the offence will have little effect. In the John Smyth case, nobody was told to shut up about Smyth’s abuses. Nobody’s job was threatened if they went to the police about Smyth.

Instead there was a common unspoken consensus, reaching all the way up to Justin Welby, that keeping quiet about it all was the right thing to do. There was no specific instance of preventing someone that could be used as evidence for a prosecution.

IICSA identified quite a few places with that kind of unspoken consensus. These places, which have the worst safeguarding culture, are therefore safe from any risk of prosecution for “preventing or deterring” a report.

And the government has nothing else to offer. This is a recipe for the next Savile or Smyth.

There is a simple fix

All this is really simple to fix, if the government wants to. An effective mandatory law needs three things.

  1. A criminal sanction directly for non-reporting
  2. For the reporting duty include any reasonable grounds for suspecting abuse.
  3. Protection from retaliation for mandated reporters acting in good faith.

There is already a Private Member’s Bill before Parliament that does all this, the Regulated and Other Activities (Mandatory Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse) Bill. The government could adopt it wholesale tomorrow.

March 30th, 2025|

The Labour Government’s Useless Child Sexual Abuse Reporting Law

A year ago, we published an article “The Government’s useless Child Sexual Abuse Reporting law

Unfortunately, we now have to publish “The Labour Government’s useless Child Sexual Abuse Reporting Law”. Because the Labour government’s measure, in Sections 45-54 of the Crime and Policing Bill is almost identical to what the Conservatives proposed a year ago.

An effective mandatory reporting measure requires three things.

  1. A statutory duty to report both known (i.e. witnessed or disclosed) child sexual abuse and reasonably grounded suspicions of child sex abuse
  2. A modest criminal sanction for failing to fulfil the duty to report
  3. Protection for mandated reporters reporting in good faith from any kind of retaliation for reporting.

The need to report suspected abuse

Child sexual abuse (being a private act) is very rarely witnessed. According to data from the ONS, children very rarely disclose sexual abuse to a person in authority – less than 10% will disclose rape or other contact sexual abuse to a person in authority at the time. And according to the NSPCC, those who do make some kind of disclosure are often indirect or incomplete in what they say, only half of disclosures are direct. So if mandatory reporting is limited to these cases, very few mandated reports will be generated. The great majority of cases documented by IICSA of abuse going unreported (sometimes for years or even decades) were of abuse that was suspected because of the behaviour of the abuser or of the victims, but where do direct disclosure was made by a child.

IICSA argued persuasively for mandatory reporting to apply to suspected as well known abuse, but lost its nerve in terms of including that in the final recommendation.

Neither the Conservative government nor the Labour government has included suspected abuse in its proposed mandatory reporting measure.

The need for a criminal sanction for non-reporting

Recommendation 13 of the IICSA final report specifically recommended that the statutory duty be backed by criminal sanctions for failure to report. IICSA also recorded a considerable number of cases of institutional hostility to reporting abuse “Leaders were sometimes more focussed on controlling what information about allegations of abuse became public rather than on ensuring authorities were properly notified so that allegations were investigated.”

IICSA described how a great many cases are not reported where knowledge or at least clear suspicions existed. It described the “desire to protect an individual or institution from reputational damage”. IICSA concluded that nothing less than a criminal sanction would change behaviour. For instance, it noted that the Welsh government had enacted a duty for specified public bodies to report children at risk of harm, but that this duty did not involved criminal sanctions for individuals who fail to comply with the duty. IICSA found that “the introduction of the referral-reporting duty in Wales had not led to a substantive change in practice”.

The Conservative government, when deciding on its approach after conducting further consultations after IICSA had reported, decided against a criminal sanction for non-reporting. It knew and documented the fact that the measure would have almost no effect. The Impact Assessment published by the Home Office stated that the rise in report was expected to be 2% – a trivial number given that most abuse (probably 85%)  goes unreported.

The Labour Government has copied the Conservative approach and chosen to have no criminal sanction for non-reporting.

DBS Referral for non-reporting

The Labour measure does differ very slightly from the Conservative approach. The Conservatives claimed that people would be referred to the DBS if they failed to report, but included no legislative mechanism for this to happen. Labour has included a legislative mechanism, but it is unlikely ever to be used and so is not going to change behaviour.

At present, under the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006, if a regulated activity  or an employment agency providing staff to a regulated activity (such as a school) believes that someone has harmed a child or is a risk to children, and decides as a result to sack them or move them from child-facing duties, or the person resigns first when they would have been sacked, then there is a legal obligation to refer that person to the DBS. Under the Labour bill, the same duty would apply if the person was sacked etc for not making a report of child sex abuse.

Some important things to realise about this

  1. The decision to make the report is in the hands of the employer, and IICSA found that many employers are hostile to reporting child sex abuse.
  2. The obligation to report only arises if the person is being sacked, moved from child-facing duties or resigns when they would otherwise have been sacked, only if harm to the child (or non-reporting of abuse in the new bill) is the specific reason for acting. If the employer doesn’t sack the person, or chooses to claim that there was a different reason for doing so then not only does the employer not have to make a DBS referral, but they cannot make a referral.

Those organisations that encourage proper reporting are unlikely to need to make a DBS referral for non-reporting. Those organisations that don’t are unlikely to want to make a DBS referral and so will engineer a situation where legally they don’t have to. Either way, this will have no effect.

Protection of reporters

Both the Conservative and Labour bills do a little better here. They make it clear that making a mandated report can’t  be considered to be a breach of confidentiality or other restriction on disclosure of information, and provides for an offence of “Preventing or deterring a person from complying with duty to report suspected child sex offence”.

There are three serious problems though with the offence as it stands

  1. It only applies to attempting to prevent the making of a report required under the duty to report. Most of the reports we need are reports of suspected abuse rather than disclosed or witnessed abuse, but these reports are not subject to the duty to report, and so the offence of preventing or deterring a report does not apply here. Most reporters will remain unprotected whistleblowers.
  2. The description of the offence allows for someone to persuade a reporter to delay making a report, so long as they don’t try and stop them making a report altogether. There is no time limit specified for the delay involved. It’sa very large loophole.
  3. There is no protection for a reporter who makea areport from subsequent retaliation.

In this, the Conservative and Labour bills are identical.

The Labour bill is just as useless as the Conservative bill. It will have almost no effect on reporting. The government knows this and doesn’t appear to care.

March 23rd, 2025|

Cheryl Gillan MP (C) – Today raised key questions about #CSAinquiry in Topical Questions to the Leader of the House

Gillan2

listen to ‘@CherylGillanMP (C) 4/12/12 HoC Gets to the heart of shortcomings in the #CSAinquiry during topical questions’ on audioBoom

December 4th, 2014|
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