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Macur Review of Historical Child Abuse

I am pleased to see you in the chair, Sir Edward. May I take this opportunity to congratulate the Minister on his appointment? This is not the easiest of debates with which to start. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) on her studied and sensible remarks.

This is a really difficult issue for Wrexham. It has cast a cloud over the years that I have been in Parliament, which are many now. The Waterhouse report was published in the year before I became a Member of Parliament and refers to events that occurred very often in Wrexham in the 1980s and 1990s, when I lived and worked in the area. There were great hopes for the Macur review. On Thursday, when the Secretary of State for Wales made a statement, I said that I was astonished. I am afraid that having considered the review to the extent I have been able to thus far, I do not in any way resile from my statement; in fact, I would intensify it.

The reaction within Wrexham has been one of huge disappointment and distress. The hon. Lady referred to Keith Gregory, who is my constituent and a local Plaid Cymru councillor in Wrexham, and to whom I spoke at the weekend. There is intense disappointment, but it simply confirms the view of many survivors about the political class, the political system and the whole world in which many of my constituents see politicians as operating. I am afraid that the report, with the redactions that have been referred to, will intensify the disillusion that the survivors of these incidents feel about the political and judicial system in north Wales.

A lot of issues will arise from the report, and I tell the Parliamentary Under-Secretary and Ministers at the Ministry of Justice that I will be pursuing many of those questions through parliamentary questions and further debate. We need a substantial debate—a full day’s debate—on this report, which is of national importance, in order to address the issues in it, once we have had the opportunity to try to read it. I congratulate the hon. Lady on reading the report: I have had real difficulty doing so because of the number of redactions in it. Many of the most important and controversial aspects of the report are very difficult to extract from the document we have.

The issue of redaction is very important. I was surprised last Thursday that the then Secretary of State for Wales made the statement, because I had expected the Lord Chancellor to make it. I have raised questions in connection with the publication of this report that have always been answered by the Ministry of Justice, which I therefore expected to be dealing with the matter. Although the report was jointly commissioned by the Wales Office and the Ministry of Justice, it is very important that Justice Ministers—I mean no disrespect to the Wales Office—should answer, because there are very technical and difficult legal questions relating to it.

It is clear that this report followed correspondence that took place between the Lord Chancellor and Lady Macur who was conducting an investigation and doing an independent report. The important issue of redaction was at the heart of that correspondence. The review itself makes it clear in paragraph 8.4 that

“the redaction of this report is a matter for the commissioning departments.”

It is very important that everyone out there understands that the redactions in the report were made by the Government, not by the judge. The only people who have seen the full report and have made the redactions are the Government.

However, that was not enough for the Lord Chancellor. Information that is given to us by Lady Justice Macur in paragraph 1.44 of the report tells us that Her Majesty’s Procurator General and Treasury Solicitor, Jonathan Jones, asked for a meeting with her to discuss the

“inclusion of names of individuals subject to unsubstantiated allegations.”

In the review, Lady Justice Macur says that she refused to have such a meeting.

That was not the end of the matter as far as the Ministry of Justice was concerned. I should make it clear that I have written to the Lord Chancellor to give him notice that I will be referring to this report and to him as an individual in this debate, because after the refusal to meet the Treasury Solicitor, the Lord Chancellor—effectively Lady Macur’s boss—wrote a letter to her. She is the head of an independent judicial inquiry investigating an alleged cover-up. He asked her to withhold the names of individuals who were the subject of allegations from the draft review presented to other Government Departments—so the Lord Chancellor asked her to take the names out of the draft report that was being sent, within the Government, to other Departments. I do not regard that as appropriate. This was an independent judicial inquiry and the matter was one for the judge.

I would have liked to question the Lord Chancellor on those points but, unfortunately, he did not present the report to Parliament, so I have not had the opportunity to do so: I will pursue those matters. In any event, the Government have redacted, as we have heard, huge swathes of the Macur review, removing in particular the names of individuals who have been the subject of speculation and who have national recognition. For example, the name Peter Morrison has been redacted from the report, but puzzlingly, other names—Greville Janner, Lord Gareth Williams—have not.