As Professor Jay so eloquently put it when she appeared before the Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday the 21^st of January 2025, when asked why some Local Authorities have to date chosen not to set up local inquiries into Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE), she answered that very often bad publicity can be the catalyst to get Local Authorities to take action on these matters, in circumstances where they have previously failed or chosen not to act. 

The same logic would appear to apply to the Government’s approach to IICSA's final recommendations published on the 20^th of October 2022. It seems that the recent media coverage of and demands for a national inquiry into child grooming gangs, sparked by comments made by Elon Musk on “X”, have caused the Government to refocus on IICSA’s recommendations.

Professor Jay was accompanied at the meeting by John O’Brien, Secretary to IICSA. Mr O’ Brien reminded the Home Affairs Committee that £187 million of taxpayer’s money had been spent on IICSA and to date none of its final recommendations had been implemented.

Prior to the hearing, Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, Dame Karen Bradley, (a former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Preventing Abuse, Exploitation and Crime.) said: “We have a responsibility to ensure that the results of comprehensive public inquiries set up by government are acted upon. For too long, children were failed by those who should have been protecting them. We are holding this session to understand how the government and the different institutions within the remit of the inquiry have responded to its findings. We want to see if there has been progress in the wide-ranging change needed to implement a comprehensive child safety framework and what more needs to be done.”

However, despite this sentiment, it was surprising how much of the 2 hours and 10 minutes hearing focussed on what successive Governments and Home Secretaries have failed to do, rather than focusing on solutions and/or a road map for the future implementation of the recommendations. 

The past failures to implement the recommendations were summed up by Professor Jay who said that the former Government “committed to nothing”, after the publication of IICSA’s final Report in October 2022. Professor Jay said that the former Government’s Response to IICSA’s Final Report and Recommendations published in May 2023 was insubstantial, inconsequential and a source of great disappointment to her and her fellow panel members at IICSA and was deeply upsetting and distressing for the victims and survivors who had engaged with IICSA in the course of its work. Professor Jay said that there were long periods of time when nothing happened, and she had no contact from officials and/or Ministers and neither did the victims and survivors.

To advance matters, in May 2023 Professor Jay said that she formed a small group to monitor the implementation of the recommendations, and she again wrote to the then Home Secretary and the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, but no response was received, and no action was taken.

Professor Jay referred to a letter that she and the other IICSA panel members had written to the Times on the 30^th of May 2023 following the Government Response to the Final Recommendations. In that letter Professor Jay had said “While the Government is free to reject or partially accept the recommendations of a statutory public inquiry, what it ought not be free to do is to purport to accept them through what is little more than a very weak and, at times, apparently disingenuous official response”. After the publication of this letter, while on holidays in June 2023, Professor Jay advised that she was contacted by a Special Advisor from the Home Office, whose main concern was not the failure by the Government to either implement or commit to implement the recommendations but who demanded to know why she and the other IICSA panel members had written to The Times. Professor Jay described the conversation with the Special Advisor as adversarial.

It appears that there has been more engagement with this Government on the issue of implementing the recommendations. Professor Jay referred to the facts that Jess Philips, the current Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Home Office, who has responsibility for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, while in opposition, attended a meeting in January 2024 with the Support Group that had been formed to monitor the implementation of the recommendations, the then Home Secretary James Cleverly was also in attendance at that meeting. 

Professor Jay and others had also met with Jess Philips in September 2024 and again last week. The September 2024 meeting was described as a general discussion about the recommendations but both Professor Jay and Mr O’Brien described the meeting last week, as a long and detailed meeting about how the recommendations would be implemented. Mr O’Brien said that there was a sense that the Home Office was trying to co-ordinate a cohesive approach across departments to implement the recommendations. He also referred to the fact that at last week’s meeting there had been a new commitment made by the Home Office that Professor Jay and others would meet regularly with officials and Ministers at the Home Office to be updated on delivering the implementation of the recommendation. Mr O'Brien confirmed that the meeting with the Home Office last week had been arranged in the wake of the recent media coverage.

Mr O'Brien said that it had also been made clear at the meeting last week that the Home Office had indicated that all 20 recommendations made by IICSA in its Final Report have been accepted by the Government.

This was off course further evidenced by the announcement of the Home Secretary on Thursday last week that the Government will:-

• Introduce a mandatory reporting duty for those working with children to report sexual abuse as part of the Crime and Policing Bill;
• Legislate to make grooming an aggravating factor when sentencing child sexual offences – so punishments properly fit the crime;
• Ensure all 43 Police forces improve data collection on child sexual abuse – including ethnicity.

The principal take away points from this morning hearing are as follows:-

• Professor Jay and Mr O’Brien rejected criticism that IICSA’s terms of reference were too broad. Professor Jay said that the width of IICSA’s investigations allowed them to look at perpetrator behaviour through a wide lens and what was clear from the outset was that the behaviour of perpetrators was similar regardless of the settings where the abuse took place.
• Professor Jay and Mr O’Brien felt that the impact of the first two chairs appointed to the original panel inquiry stepping down, due to their perceived closeness to individuals and establishments which were to be investigated, had eroded the trust and confidence of the victims and survivors, who were and remain at all times at the heart of the work of the IICSA and still remain at the heart of the work yet to be undertaken to implement the recommendations.
• Professor Jay says she remains of the view that the 3 most important recommendations made by IICSA in its final report are:
  • Mandatory Reporting:
  • National Redress Scheme for England and Wales
  • A Child Protection Authority for England and a Child Protection Authority for Wales.
• The big weakness of a statutory public inquiry established under the Inquiries Act 2005 is that there is no provision for the independent oversight and/or monitoring of the recommendations made and whether they are implemented at all. Both Professor Jay and Mr O’Brien accepted that they have been made aware by officials that the interdepartmental aspect of the recommendations, which requires several different Government Departments to co-operate, was one of the main challenges in implementing the recommendations. They were both quite fair in accepting that the Home Office itself was only responsible for the implementation of 4 of the final 20 recommendations made. Their overall sense was that the former Government couldn’t get co-operation at an interdepartmental level to drive forward a cohesive approach on implementing the recommendations.
• Mr O'Brien made the point that in terms of implementing the final recommendations, he felt that there were lessons to be learned from how IICSA had monitored institutional responses to recommendations it made, approximately 80% of these recommendations were implemented. IICSA had a clear timetable for the implementation of its recommendations by institutions, which comprised of writing and publishing correspondence between IICSA and the institution, detailing what steps were being taken by institutions to comply with the recommendation. If adequate responses were not received the Chair, Professor Jay could exercise her powers under section 21 of the Inquiries Act 2005 to require a witness to provide a statement on the status of the implementation and/or failure to implement the recommendation. Further information about this process can be found here https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports/process-monitoring-responses-inquiry-recommendations.html
• In the context of discussing Mandatory Reporting there was some limited discussion about the need for the introduction of candour but Mr O'Brien noted that this had been introduced in the NHS, with limited effectiveness.
• Professor Jay accepted that there has been a limited attempt to implement the recommendation on mandatory reporting, which has been included in the Criminal Justice Bill. That fell when the election was called but she went on to note that this was a fairly watered-down version of mandatory reporting when considered in the context of IICSA’s recommendation on this matter.
• Professor Jay said that they were aware that some of the recommendations could take years to implement as they would require primary legislation and that the recommendation for a National Redress Scheme for England and Wales would be costly and couldn’t be provided overnight. However, what they had not expected was complete silence in terms of implementing the recommendations and no effort to engage with the victims and survivors.
• In discussing the delay in implementing recommendations, Professor Jay referred to the fact that there is a wealth of domestic and international material available to the Government in relation to the establishment of a National Redress Scheme and pointed to similar schemes already in existence in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Australia, and Canada. 
• Professor Jay reminded the Home Affairs Committee that sexual abuse is rarely a one-off event and that IICSA’s findings were that the average length of time that a child is sexually abused is 4 years and that it takes on average 26 years to disclose that abuse as an adult.
• Professor Jay also distanced herself from calls from the Conservatives and Reform UK for a new inquiry into grooming gangs, though she clarified that grooming gangs was never a description that she would use herself. Professor Jay said that this coverage was rampant with dis-information and proved the need for a single core data set as was recommended by IICSA. She went on to say that there had never been any call for a second inquiry into CSE until the recent media coverage on this matter, even though she had issued her final report in October 2022. In the context of calls for a further independent statutory inquiry Mr O’Brien suggested consideration should also be given to the establishment of Non-Statutory Inquiries, like the inquiry into Hillsborough, which he said are often successful, take less time and are less costly. Professor Jay also observed that a further Statutory Public Inquiry will not give victims and survivors what they want, which is justice. She went on to say that many of the recommendations made by IICSA apply equally to CSE. Mr O’Brien wondered whether the Inquiries Act 2005, should be amended to allow Regional Mayors to establish Regional Statutory Inquiries rather than incur the cost and length of time that it would take to run a National Public Statutory Inquiry.
• When asked who should monitor the implementation of the recommendations made by IICSA and other Statutory Public Inquiries, Professor Jay accepted that the Home Affairs Committee could play a part in this, but the Inquiries Act 2005 would have to be amended. She also said that any independent body tasked with overseeing the implementation of the recommendations would have to work with victims and survivors and, where necessary avail of experts, where they would add value. Mr O'Brien said that the Inquiries Act 2005 need to be updated and he queried its relevancy some 20 years on from enactment.

The session ended with Professor Jay, the former Chair of IICSA, calling for the "full implementation" of the 20 recommendations made in IICSA’s Final Report in October 2022, get it done she said.

If you wish to view the meeting, you can do so here Parliamentlive.tv - Home Affairs Committee