Author Archives: davidhencke

The Unsavoury Boom in Child Grooming revealed by Oxford gang

Posted on by
From an anti-grooming campaign. Pic courtesy: blog.childquest.org

From an anti-grooming campaign. Pic courtesy: blog.childquest.org

The huge scale of the activities of the Oxford paedophile ring revealed yesterday when seven men were convicted of 43 charges of rape, child prostitution and trafficking is but the tip of the iceberg.

Extraordinary figures revealed earlier that police forces across England and Wales are engaged in more than 30 separate investigations into suspected child sexual abuse and exploitation.

The most damning thing is the failure of social services and the police to get a grip on the situation despite being warned and some of the victims going to the police for help.

A damning article  in today’s Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/may/14/oxford-abuse-ring-social-services) based on an interview with one of the victims reveals yet again the failure of authorities  to support them. Indeed it is worse. From her interview it appears that Oxfordshire  county council MADE UP they were giving her ” wrap around support.” to her and her family. This is  compounded by a letter from Jim Leivers, director for children in Oxfordshire,  saying he had been ” closely involved in providing support to me.”. This is branded ” a lie” by the girl.

This is very similar to Downing Street claiming £10.5 m was being spent on helping victims of historic child abuse when the money was going to rape crisis centres – when challenged about support for victims of Operation Fernbridge.

But meanwhile the scale of this problem will only keep on growing The figures  for ongoing investigations disclosed in an investigation by my brilliant colleague Mark Conrad in two articles for Exaro News ( http://www.exaronews.com)  and in a story in The Sun  (see http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4762065/Thirty-major-police-probes-into-paedophile-gangs-under-way.html) suggest that recent cases in Rochdale and the current trial in Oxford are not isolated incidents. A full list of police operations  released under freedom of information requests  is on Exaro’s website.

While overall crime is down, this potential epidemic involving child grooming and drug abuse suggest either the police have only just become aware of this or it is becoming a very serious problem in the UK.

Not all the suspected crimes are in big cities – Lancashire is the top of the list for investigations – and even in rural areas like North Wales it is a problem.

Questions need to be asked why this happening and why  England is returning to an era more eloquently described by Charles Dickens and Samuel Pepys where young girls  were exploited for prostitution. Is it seen by some unsavoury characters as a new perverted business opportunity, is it the sexualised world fuelled by the internet?

Whatever is going on politicians in all parties  ought to be addressing this question. It seems to extend to all levels of society as the current investigation by Exaro into historic child abuse in the 1980s is beginning to uncover.

Police raid home of former gay guest house contact in paedophile investigation

Posted on by
The former Elm Tree Guest House where Kasir was the contact and fined at the Old Bailey now flats Pic courtesy: Exaro

The former Elm Guest House where Kasir was the contact and fined at the Old Bailey.Now flats Pic courtesy: Exaro

The  police investigation into the political paedophile ring has taken a new turn with detectives looking at  Haroon Kasir, known as Harry, who was the contact for the Elm Guest House home in Barnes at the time it is alleged it was used by MPs and other prominent people in the 1980s.

My former Guardian  colleague David Pallister has managed to trace Mr Kasir and had a brief conversation with him. His full story is at http://www.exaronews.com .

Harry Kasir was convicted at the Old Bailey in 1990 with his now dead wife of  keeping a disorderly house- a brothel –  , fined £1000 and given a nine month prison sentence suspended for two years.  The case was  reported in Capital Gay at the time.

Now aged 69 he went on to be a driving instructor and is said to be currently working as a driver for a Kingston based charity that helps disabled people. they are understood to have raided his home but he has not been arrested in connection with the investigation.

The move comes, as previously reported in Exaro and on this website,  when the police have upgraded the scoping exercise called Operation Fairbank to a criminal investigation, Operation Fernbridge.

Boys, some of them as young as ten, were said to be taken to the  guest house from a Richmond Council children’s home, Grafton Close, at the time. Evidence supplied to Exaro from a former employee of Richmond Council and from  Labour Mp, Tom Watson, is helping the police continue their investigation.

Tom Watson said:  I am confident that the Metropolitan police team are committed to a through investigation that leaves no stone unturned. As they get nearer the truth it is vital they are given the time and space to conduct the investigation without interference. I urge any witnesses or victims to come forward if they think they can help with the inquiry. No matter what has happened in the past, now is the time for your voice to be heard.”

Political Paedophile Scandal: Met Police announce criminal investigation

Posted on by

Scotland Yard has announced that there will now be a criminal investigation into the sexual abuse of young boys in the care of the London borough of Richmond in the 1980s.

The criminal investigation will concentrate on boys who were living at Grafton Close  children’s home and are alleged to have been taken to Elm House guest house in Barnes, south west London where they were sexually abused.

The police decision follows a raid on the home of Mary Moss, the former organiser of the now defunct National Association of Young People in Care in London  when the police took away boxes of documents. These  included the names of prominent people and MPs and former ministers alleged to have stayed at the guest house.

The police  have also obtained documents and records from Richmond Council on the boys in their care at the time.

The rest of Operation Fairbank will be extended to include fresh allegations passed on to the police by Tom Watson, Labour MP. The criminal investigation is named Operation Fernbridge.

There could be the first arrests of people in the next few weeks, though the initial arrests will not include politicians. Full story in http://www.exaronews.com.

The Met Police statement in full:

The Metropolitan Police Service has today launched an investigation, Operation Fernbridge, into historic allegations of child abuse in the early 1980s at the Elm Guest House, Rocks Lane, Barnes, London.

The investigation will be led by the Child Abuse Investigation Command.

Anyone with information is asked to contact officers on 020 7161 0500.

The allegations under Operation Fernbridge were initially assessed under Operation Fairbank which was information passed to police by MP Tom Watson. Operation Fernbridge reached the threshold for a criminal investigation.

We will not be providing a running commentary on this inquiry.

Why Eric Pickles will allow councils to fiddle your cash – MPs’ damning verdict

Posted on by
Eric Pickles:will he make it easier for councils to fiddle your cash?

Eric Pickles:will he make it easier for councils to fiddle your cash?

Do you believe your council spends your money wisely? Are you sure none of your council tax is wasted through incompetence or fraud? Do you trust all your local politicians to be honest? Probably the answer to all three is no!

Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, has a flagship policy of scrapping the body that  tries to protect you from all of this – the Audit Commission. His passionate belief is that this body of highly skilled auditors and officials  is a load of bureaucratic nonsense – and has produced figures to claim that the public will save  over £1bn in a decade by scrapping it.

Now an all party committee of MPs led by the indefatigable Margaret Hodge, scourge of  tax avoiding Amazon and Starbucks and chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, has come to some damning conclusions on what the government is about to do. There is a full report by me on the Exaro News website (http://www.exaronews.com).

Basically Pickles wants to leave it to local councils, health trusts and the new NHS commissioning bodies to police themselves by appointing their own auditors,taking away a whistleblower hot line to the Audit Commission, and allowing big accountancy firms  free rein to up their charges by picking off individual councils. It also allows  even more cosy relationships to be built between the auditor and the local council and leaves whistleblowers nowhere to go.

Given the present background of mass privatisation of services this plain daft. The most extreme example is Tory controlled Barnet’s plan to hand almost everything over to the private sector – see the Broken Barnet website for detailed coverage (http://wwwbrokenbarnet.blogspot.co.uk). Are locally appointed auditors going to be up to doing a tough job – already Grant Thornton missed the MetPro private securityscandal in the borough. How will they keep up with all the services being privatised?

Some amazing facts are comments in  the report. The government claim it will save £137m a year. The MPs say the figure is more likely to be £2.4m. They warn of a fragmented and more complex audit regime.

And on the appointment of local auditors they say: “The proposals for self-appointment of auditors risk compromising the independence of audit. The Government must intervene to ensure that existing governance structures within local bodies are not duplicated; existing contracts are managed proficiently; economies of scale in audit fees are not lost; quality of audit does not diminish; value for money can be measured comprehensively and consistently; fees, especially for smaller bodies, do not increase as a result of increased tendering costs and potential limitations to the market in audit and; processes for auditor removal, whistleblowing and public interest reporting are rigorous enough so that the regime is sufficiently robust in difficult circumstances.”

The link to the full report is: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmdraftlocaudit/696/696vw01.htm.

Pretty damning stuff. And they call on the auditor general, Amyas Morse, to  offer to take calls from whistleblowers as well as local auditors who could have a vested interest in not upsetting the council.

Otherwise they warn that whistleblowers will contact the media, and in Barnet’s case,it will be  the local bloggers. Too right if Pickles gets his way on this dodgy piece of legislation, your money is at stake.

Exclusive: Police raid gathers evidence on MPs and celebs in political paedo inquiry

Posted on by
The former Elm Tree Guest House now flats; Pic courtesy: Exaro

The former Elm  Guest House now flats. The raid was at a separate flat in London where Mary Moss lives. Pic courtesy: Exaro

Operation Fairbank, the Met  Police investigation, started after allegations from  Labour  MP  Tom Watson of an alleged paedo ring involving  Westminster MPs, has taken a significant new turn.

A report on Exaro News website ( http://www.exaronews.com ) today  by ex Guardian journos David Pallister and myself  goes into full details.

Basically documents, including a list of Mps , Conservative, Labour and Liberal – some dead, some alive – and other prominent figures , which we have seen but are not naming, are now in the possession of the police. They also have the 16 names of the boys who  could have been sexually abused.
The raid last week on the flat of Mary Moss, a former head of the now defunct National Association of Young People in Care, allowed police to look at documents relating to the Elm Tree Guest House in Barnes, west London, in the 1980s. Police obtained a search warrant after she declined to co-operate but she is now co-operating fully with the investigation.

Another 19 box files , hidden in a neighbours shed, were voluntarily handed over to the police by Mary Moss after  the raid.

The police have also asked Richmond Council to hand over a full dossier of young people in their care at the time after being alerted by a source who came to Exaro.

Fire Privatisation was flawed says AssetCo Chairman in £50m claim

Posted on by

london fire engine                                                                      London Fire Engine: Pic courtesy i.newsrt.co.uk

The scandal over the privatisation of the vehicles owned by London and Lincolnshire  fire brigade is a never ending saga. First the company pulled out of the UK to concentrate on the Middle East  and then sold its London assets to a baronet for £2 only to have them taken over by Babcock in an emergency deal by the London Fire Brigade. ( see previous stories on this blog).

Now with a new interim report from the firm the real cost to the people who invested in a” couldn’t fail” take over of public assets is revealed in the balance sheet.

And astoundingly the chairman of the rump company, Dr Tudor Davies has now admitted publicly that the  PFI deals with the London and Lincolnshire fire brigades to take over and replace all the brigades’ engines were  based on a ” flawed business and financial model.. without any reasonable prospect of shareholder value.”

For the public record this is his signed statement in the latest interim accounts:

“The new Board has been considering claims to recover value for shareholders given the very significant decline in value following the four separate fundraisings amounting to £53m between 2009 and 2011 when, from the published accounts it appeared the Group’s financial position was satisfactory.

“As explained in the 2011 Annual Report, the massive restatements to the 2009 and 2010 financial accounts and the requirement for a Scheme of Arrangement subsequently showed a very different situation, and the differences arose from the UK businesses.  The funds raised between 2009 and 2011 had primarily been utilised in support of an apparently flawed business and financial model associated with the UK vehicle leasing and maintenance business, without any reasonable prospect of shareholder value.

“Following expert advice, the new Board is at the early stages of pursuing claims against those associated with the past for in excess of £50 million.”

His proposed launch of a £50m claim against dismissed chief executive  John Shannon and chief financial officer, Frank Flynn, among others who quit, may have little chance of success. As this blog has already reported Shannon is selling his mansion in Northern Ireland and was on the way to be declared bankrupt. Flynn’s fate is not known.

But the figures speak for themselves. The accounts reveal that by offloading the company’s UK assets to the baronet, Sir Aubrey Brocklebank, some £84m  of losses was averted.  Last August net liabilities were £51m for the two fire brigades and that  was after creditors had to settle for a £4.9m payment –  losing around 78 per cent of their investments.

Shareholders lost virtually all their money – when the shares were reduced to junk statues – some 300 times below their best value.

Shares are still trading in the remainder of the company which now is exclusively providing fire services in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates where it has made a £3m profit. One wonders what  Arab Investors would make of the shennaghins in the UK if they knew the full picture.

The lesson of this privatisation exercise seems very clear. It was bad for public services in London and Lincolnshire, bad for the banks and other big investors and even bad for the ” get  rich quick ” small shareholders who lost most of  their cash. Anybody who thought they were going to make a quick buck  out of the emergency services should think twice.

My Blog in 2012

Posted on by

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

This blog was viewed about 82,000 times in 2012. This modest jump takes the total number of hits to over 167,000 since it was launched three years ago – meaning the number of hits increased by nearly a quarter in a year. As revealed in the full report from WordPress the most heavily read blog was the one disclosing that NHS Direct was facing near oblivion after losing out to GP’s co-operatives and private profit making companies. This has attracted 5400 views – 3560 on one day – just 44 short of  an all time time record for this site.

The second biggest hit was the official inspector’s report disclosing strip searching of women at Gatwick Airport and the humiliation of gay people by border and customs staffs. this attracted 3839 hits and is still regularly getting traffic.

Two of the other big hits are about scandals in the privatisation of the London fire services  and the Whitehall tax scam which  earned me Political Journalist of the Year this year.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude turned out to be the sixth most popular read in 2012 at 2,549 on the tale of how he was always late paying his utility bills and  service charges on his Kennington flat – even though the taxpayer was picking up the tab.

Finally thanks to Twitter, Guido Fawkes,Facebook, the London FBU and Liberal Conspiracy as top referrers to this site. and also to the indefatigable Mrs Angry from Barnet for making the most comments, always noisy and always right!

Click here to see the complete report.

Stuff the poor to help the elderly: Hunt moves to adopt Lansley’s bad plan for the NHS

Posted on by

Hunt moves to redistribute NHS cash to benefit better off Tory areas at expense of inner city poor

davidhencke's avatarWestminster Confidential

Update: The new NHS Commissioning Board announced this week it was proceeding with scrapping the existing formula from next April – by adopting a flat rate increase  for funding this year. It also announced it will ” conduct an urgent fundamental review of the approach to allocations, drawing on the expert advice of ACRA and involving all partners whose functions impact on outcomes and inequalities.” This will come into force in 2014-15.

In fact this will mean a redistribution to areas with large numbers of elderly people at the expense of poorer areas like the North East of England, Central Manchester  and Salford and the London borough of Tower Hamlets. All this will be in place for the run up to the next general election.

Fresh from creating chaos as part of his so-called NHS ” reforms” Andrew Lansley has let slip another dastardly plan to cope with the genuine burgeoning costs of…

View original post 711 more words

Exclusive: Police re-open investigation into London political paedo ring

Posted on by

Elm-Guest-House (1)

ELm House Guest House,Barnes as it is now : Picture courtesy: Exaro News

Exaro News ( http://www.exaronews.com) today reveals that for the last two months the police have secretly been scoping a new investigation into senior politicians and their involvement in a paedophile ring, involving  under age boys, that took place in the 1980s.

This is separate to the current Operation Yewtree  investigation into Jimmy Savile and other celebrities, which mainly involves under age girls.

They are looking again at a raid that took place in 1982 on a  guest house in Barnes, south London, which appeared to be being used as a gay brothel and was frequented by prominent figures including, I am told, ministers, Tory MPs, a Liberal MP and two Labour Mps. Under age boys in  the care  of Richmond council and other local authorities were  visiting or staying at the guest house.

The inquiry-under the title Operation Fairbank – will also examine whether there was a cover up which meant that the Met Police at the time and when complaints about it resurfaced twenty years later  never followed up the investigation. Nobody was ever charged with any offence, even though the place had been raided and people bundled into police cars.

The place – 27, Rocks Lane  in Barnes – is now a very respectable and none of the people living there now having to do with events when it was the Elm House guest house between 1979 and 1982.

Exaro News was put on to this inquiry by a former Richmond Council official and trade unionist and we took him to give evidence to the police who were already investigating similar allegations passed to Tom Watson, the Labour MP. He raised the issue of the 1980s paedo ring in the Commons.

Exaro News will be covering this scandal over the next few days, starting today, and are still investigating, these, and other more serious allegations in other parts of the country. I shall be blogging in more   detail about the difficulties facing the police in handling such a difficult and fraught investigation.

Suffice to say anybody who believes that Tom Watson has raised this issue for pure political gain and this is  a fabricated story better  think again very carefully. I know it has very wide ramifications and could  lead to a scandal even bigger than the hacking inquiry.

My Political Journalist of the Year Award: Praise be the Whitehall moles

Posted on by
Revealed: My secret source in Whitehall Pic Credit:BBC

Revealed: My secret source in Whitehall Pic Credit:BBC

Today I am really thrilled to win Political Journalist of  the Year Press Gazette awards for Exaro News -award  last night.

But the real tribute should go to a couple of fearless Whitehall moles who put me on the trail of the story  of massive tax avoidance at the heart of Whitehall.

While journalists must never reveal  their sources, there is at least one good tip from this for journos pursuing questionable deals done in Whitehall.

And it came from first source. He was the originator of the suggestion that senior people in Whitehall had set up  highly complicated arrangements to avoid paying any tax and national insurance. And he had heard a rumour  that one of the most grotesque examples was a recent appointment to the top job at the Students Loan Company. A left of centre character who firmly believed in the ethos of public service  he was worried that Whitehall was being corrupted by the widespread tax avoidance. We now know it is rife.

But rather than leak information which breaks the Whitehall rules we devised a different strategy. Between us we drafted a targeted freedom of information request to the Student loans Company and Vince Cable’s Department for Business  which would make it very difficult for either department to deny. During our meetings at various hostelries across London – I won’t divulge his favourite malt  in case the Whitehall thought police try to trace him- we developed the story.

Sure enough after a suitable interval back came some 60 pages of complicated e-mail traffic between Bis, the Student Loans Company, the Cabinet Office and more surprising, the outside advice from private management consultants – one paper was volunteered because they were worried we would distort their opinions – and even letters from Revenue and Customs approving the arrangement. We spent further hours  at certain hostelries analysing the results which were far worse than he thought. We spent much more time chasing up every conceivable angle before Exaro and BBC Newsnight  were ready to go with the tale.

The result was immediate. Ed Lester, the head of the Student Loans Company, had his tax arrangement stopped and Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury who had personally approved his salary had to admit he didn’t even spot the tax avoidance. He ordered a Whitehall wide inquiry.

But it was not all over.  The inquiry identified 2500 civil servants on similar deals. But had they gone too far? Enter a new mole from another part of Whitehall.  Seeing Danny Alexander’s letter to George Osborne he was furious. He felt Alexander had caught too many in his net, including genuine freelances  having bona fide reasons for working this way. This guy, a mischievous right of centre social libertarian character who enjoy’s Guido Fawkes blog, decided the world should know before Danny had a chance. Hence another story for Exaro News and BBC Newsnight.

One might feel sorry for Danny – damned if he doesn’t, damned if he does. Except of course while we all suffer his cuts  paradoxically he has never been so wealthy in his life as a Cabinet minister. And he has lots of  dinners with his chum. George Osborne.

Good for him though in ordering the inquiry. But the greatest thing of all is that he couldn’t cover this up even if he wanted to – thanks to the use of freedom of information. No wonder Jack Straw and Tony Blair now regret giving the public and journos the chance to find out what is really going on government.