The family of the late former Labour peer Greville Janner is planning legal action to have allegations of abuse by him excluded from the government’s inquiry into child sex abuse.
Daniel Janner QC, the son of Lord Janner, told the Sunday Telegraph the family was considering asking for a judicial review to halt investigations into their father, who died in December 2015.
The inquiry is already reeling from the unexpected departure of its chair, Dame Lowell Goddard, who announced on Thursday that she would be stepping down after less than a year.
Goddard, a New Zealand judge, is the third chair to step down from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which is examining decades of allegations of institutionalised abuse.
In a statement explaining why she was leaving the role of chair, which paid £360,000 a year, Goddard, 67, said it had been “incredibly difficult” to leave her family in New Zealand, and that the inquiry had a “legacy of failure which has been hard to shake off”. She suggested the whole process should have started again when she took on the role.
However, senior officials and lawyers connected with the inquiry told the Sunday Times they had been threatening to make a declaration of no confidence in Goddard before she resigned, saying she had an “autocratic” manner and that there was a “terminal” loss of confidence in her.
Hours before Lowell resigned on Thursday afternoon, the Janner family sent the inquiry team an email saying they were beginning a legal bid to get the allegations against him removed from the scope of the inquiry.
Daniel Janner said the reasons for the family’s request included the refusal of the inquiry to allow witnesses to be cross-examined by the family’s lawyers. He also said the inquiry’s remit was to examine institutional treatment of abuse and that his father was not convicted of a crime.
“It is a manifestly unfair procedure,” Janner told the Sunday Telegraph. “It is difficult enough that he is dead.”
The Janner family said they were convinced their push to have the former Labour MP removed from the inquiry was a factor in Lowell’s resignation.
The inquiry was to hear testimony that Janner abused children as far back as the 1950s, and while he was MP for Leicester West, but that these allegations were covered up by the police and Labour party.
Public hearings into Janner were due to begin next month and were postponed by Lowell until March at the earliest.
The allegations against Janner first emerged publicly in 1991, but no action was taken. In 2015, the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was enough evidence to merit prosecution but it deemed such a prosecution not in the public interest because Janner was suffering from dementia. This decision was overturned on review and a trial of the facts was scheduled for April 2016. However, this process was halted by Janner’s death in December 2015, aged 87.
The IICSA has had submissions from more than 20 alleged victims of Janner from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, the Guardian understands, and the inquiry will be asked to decide whether or not the allegations are well founded, and whether there were any institutional failings.
Among the evidence submitted to the inquiry regarding Janner are claims that in the mid-1970s, he posed as a carer in a children’s home before abusing a male youth. He has also been accused of abusing a child at a junior school in Leicestershire.
