Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)

I am conscious of the time, but I will try to give the noble Lord a response to that. On mandatory reporting, we are focusing on two specific issues. First, if a person, whoever that person is—a teacher, social worker, police officer or whoever—has a disclosure from a victim to them, they have a mandatory duty to feed that in to the law enforcement agencies for investigation. That creates a dynamic, first and foremost, that if a child goes to an adult who is in a responsible position and says, “I have been abused”, the adult does not make the judgment of “Yes, you have” or “No, you haven’t”, the adult says, “I have to report that now to an appropriate authority”. Secondly, and this is a more difficult side of this case, if somebody who has committed abuse goes to their MP and says that—I had a case once where that happened to me as a Member of Parliament—or they go to a priest or another individual and confess to a crime, they also have the statutory duty to report the issue to the authority at hand. I think that is an important issue. It is about disclosure, it is about action. I withdraw what I said about the priest: I may have overstepped the mark there, and I wish to keep the House embedded in truth and fact. The essential point is that if an individual—a child or an abuser—reports that, the person they report it to has the ability to disclose that information to the police, who will then investigate and action it accordingly. I think that will help a dynamic of reporting and surfacing of information. I note the noble Lord’s points on historical abuse. We have had much discussion in this House, and I am willing to have further discussion accordingly when it is raised.