Andrew Lansley: No debate on child sex abuse now

The professional organisation for social workers, the British Association of Social workers, has asked its 15000 members to lobby MPs to press  for a national overarching inquiry into historic child sexual abuse

It comes as the number of MPs  backing the call  launched by seven MPs including former children’s minister, Tim Loughton and Zac Goldsmith has now jumped to over 100.

The full story by my colleagues Mark Conrad and Alex Varley-Winter is published on the Exaro website today.

David Niven,former chairman of the BASW who runs a child protection consultancy, told Exaro that a national inquiry was “long overdue”.

“A national inquiry is much needed, and it is about time it happened. We have campaigned for decades for an inquiry that would be comprehensive, which would ‘clear the air’, reassure the public and co-ordinate the way forward for child protection.”

All this shows is that the government is going to come under growing pressure to act and that David Cameron and Andrew Lansley, the leader of the House of Commons and the man responsible for the  unpopular  NHS  reform and privatisation  programme, are going to find it more difficult to stick to their line in trying to ignore the move.

Mr Lansley at the moment  doesn’t even want Parliament to debate the issue. I bet you he doesn’t.