Privileges Committee hears all sides over Charity Commission breaching Parliamentary privilege on Ombudsman’s sex abuse reports

Posted on December 8, 2025 by davidhencke

A rare but virtually unreported public hearing by the Privileges Committee on Budget Day revealed a sharp divide between the Parliamentary Ombudsman and the Charity Commission over the role of charities in safeguarding children and adults who have been sexually abused.

The hearing was sparked off by Parliament unanimously reporting the Charity Commission to the Privileges Committee after Stephen Hoare, the chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, decided the Commission had breached Parliamentary privilege by wanting to delay publication of the reports until after a judicial hearing being called by the Commission. I did a report here .

The reports which Parliament compelled the Ombudsman to publish with final conclusions covering complaints of a recent adult sex abuse case – Miss A – and a historic child sexual abuse at a school -Mr U.

Mr U later contacted my blog and waived his anonymity to give me a detailed account of what had happened at a Roman Catholic school in Blackburn when it was run by a paedophile priest. The blog about this is here.

The hearing began with a statement on the issue from Saira Salimi, the Speaker’s Counsel.

She told the hearing: “This is quite a difficult case, because it does raise difficult questions about
the relationship between parliamentary and legal accountability. There is a power conferring a discretion on a public authority to report in certain circumstances, and the report is made to Parliament. Although it looks at first glance like a function that might be reviewable by the courts, the interaction of parliamentary and legal accountability may mean that the decision is not justiciable.”

She said that if the issue of privilege had not been the raised the Parliamentary Ombudsman would have been inhibited from laying the reports before Parliament.

She added:” this is an unusual case where Parliament and the courts are on the same territory at the
same time. That is not unprecedented but is unusual, because of the self denying ordinance that the House normally maintains in relation to matters before the courts under the sub judice resolution. It is my hope that our intervention in this case will assist both the courts and Parliament in carrying out their respective roles, which are constitutionally distinct ands equally important.”

Karl Banister, Director of Operations, Legal and Clinical and Deputy Ombudsman at Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO). gave evidence.

He told MPs: “the[ charity] commission should have an independent person review Mr U’s case to consider whether the reasoning was adequately accounted for; consider whether the outcome would have been different; look for learning on how it engages in such cases;[and] look at
its risk guidance;” Similar recommendations were made in Miss A’s case.

It is these recommendations that the Charity Commission is objecting to and says that the Ombudsman exceeded her powers and that such recommendations are unlawful.

He revealed considerable attempts were made at mediating the dispute.

“My assessment was that it was better not to provoke the commission to issue legal proceedings. It is obviously unattractive for two public bodies to be litigating. Were they to do so, they would likely get an injunction, and that would be an additional cost to the public purse.”

However in the end the Charity Commission decided to go ahead with a judicial review. it said:”“a declaration that the decision of 14 March 2025 is unlawful”—that is, our decision that it was
not compliant—“that the 14 March decision is quashed, that the defendant pay the claimant’s cost of the claim or any other order the court considers appropriate. That is what the judicial review sought.”

The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee were informed and the Parliamentary Ombudsman stuck to its point that the Charity Commission had not fully complied with decision. It was then taken out of their hands and Mr Hoare, the committee chair, decided to raise the privilege issue and compel the reports to be published so the committee could consider them.

David Holdswoth, chief executive of the Charity Commission

The Charity Commission brought a team of people to hearing headed by the chief executive David Holdsworth.

He told MPs:”The decision of the PHSO in its letter of 14 March—that we should reinvestigate criminal matters already investigated by the police, the CPS or the wider criminal justice system but deemed not able to proceed—has grave implications, in our view, for anyone involved in running a charity and, indeed, for wider citizens’ rights under the criminal justice process.
It is also our view that the ombudsman cannot retake regulatory decisions made by the commission to force a different conclusion, replacing our judgment with its own. It is for those reasons that we reluctantly sought to clarify matters through the courts.”

It soon became clear – and this was reinforced during the national Child Sex Abuse inquiry – that the commission regards the Commission as primarily an administrative and registration authority not an investigatory authority.

It was also clear MPs and the Speaker’s Counsel thought that the matter could have been cleared up at a meeting of the PACAC committee without going to the courts.

But Felix Rechtman, head of litigation at the commission said:”: We are not saying that the PHSO decision is just inappropriate. We go further: we say it is unlawful, and matters of law are
reserved to the courts under our constitutional arrangement.”

It is quite clear this issue is going to run and run. The courts have not given the Charity Commission a date for a judicial review hearing yet. The commission will first have to get permission to bring the judicial review and then have a hearing. The next stage will be the Privileges Committee report on whether the Commission has committed a contempt of the House.

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Exclusive: Complainant” Mr U ” waives anonymity to reveal the child sex abuse cover up behind the Charity Commission and Parliamentary Ombudsman dispute

Posted on September 10, 2025 by davidhencke

Kevin O’Neill Marist college principal and paedophile Pic credit: Lancashire Evening Telegraph

Damian Murray tells Westminster Confidential about his long battle with the Roman Catholic charity which covered up child sex abuse for 11 years

This is a story of the concealment and denial of child sex abuse by a charismatic principal of a college and religious charity who escaped justice in his lifetime and the failure of many organisations, including the Charity Commission and the charity to do anything about it.

Father Kevin O’Neill, a Marist priest, was principal of the Roman Catholic St Mary’s College in Blackburn. It was closed down in 2022 with £8.2 million debts reportedly caused by falling student numbers. It had been propped up by the last Tory government with emergency funding since 2020.

He was principal of the college from 1978 to 1993 and worked in Blackburn since 1964. He was born in Barking, east London and attended the Roman Catholic St Mary’s College in Middlesbrough going on to a get a degree at Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Damian was a pupil at the school between 1970 and 1977 and only discovered years later when a former pupil Graham Caveney revealed in a memoir that he had been sexually assaulted by O’Neill when he was a pupil there. It was then he realised O’Neill, as he long suspected, had been trying to groom him. The book, The Boy with Perpetual Nervousness was reviewed in The Guardian in 2017. See here.

Unlike Graham Caveney he was never sexually assaulted. It was in 2017 -seven years ago – that he started putting in a complaint to the Charity Commission and the Department for Education only to discover that neither were keen to take action. That is what led him to complain via his MP to the Parliamentary Ombudsman who have been the only people to do something about it

His view of the process is scathing. “This tortuously extended process also uncovered to me the worryingly close personal and organisational relationships actively fostered and maintained between the UK Roman Catholic Church and both the DfE and the Commission. It has shown in my view the
Commission in particular to be proudly unaccountable, intransigent, incompetent and
completely unfit for purpose.”

The former St Mary’s College, Blackburn Pic credit: Lancashire Evening Telegraph

The cover up by the Marist priests is as bad as the actual child sexual abuse. When it was admitted in 1993 none of the governors of the school were apparently told and the principal was packed off to the United States on the grounds he was sick. When he died back in the UK in 2011 after getting dementia a celebratory mass was held at the school and the Lancashire Evening Telegraph is full of glowing tributes to him from former pupils with his nickname ” the Rev Kev” prominently mentioned. None of the pupils would have known about his dirty secret.

As bad as that the school in 2008 named a new £2.5 million arts centre in his honour – the O’Neill Academy for Performing Arts – which is now in use as a community venue.

And as late as 2024 the accounts of Marist society a curious note reveals :“At the start of 2023, the Charity was informed by the RLSS [ Religious Life Safeguarding Service] of an historic allegation made against a deceased member of the Society. The allegation was immediately investigated with all relevant parties (including the Charity Commission) notified of the event. After a full investigation and professional advice, the victim received a private financial settlement of £30,000 in full and final settlement of the claim. The RLSS has now closed this case.”

Damian says the charity ” deliberately lied about and concealed O’Neill’s abuse from the police; from school and charity regulators; from charitable donors and beneficiaries; from current, former and prospective staff, pupils and parents at St Mary’s College from other potential victims of O’Neill’s grooming or abuse; and from the wider public.”

He said :”The Diocese of Middlesbrough, the Department for Education and the Charity Commission have all failed to demonstrate effective, timely, or appropriate oversight of the Marist Fathers at any time
since the abuse was disclosed in 1993. Between 2017 and 2020 when I brought these important concerns to their attention in great detail and in line with their statutory or other formal responsibilities, these allegedly independent regulators have blankly refused to address any of them directly. They have simply chosen to turn a blind eye, both to O’Neill’s sexual abuse of a child in his care and to its long-term, deliberate concealment by the Marist Fathers.”

He managed to send his evidence to the national child sex abuse inquiry in the UK headed by Professor Alexis Jay about the case, though by that stage its formal hearings were closed. The inquiry has published a wider critical report on child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.

The Charity Commission says it is beyond its power to do anything about a charity’s role in “historic ” cases of child sexual abuse but this will be tested in a judicial review it is bringing against the Parliamentary Ombudsman claiming it is exceeding its powers in this case.

Blackburn is not alone in suffering child sexual abuse at the hands of Marist Fathers or the associated Marist Brothers. The Royal Commission into child sex abuse in Australia reported in 2014 on cases in schools in Queensland and New South Wales – one involving 19 boys – and in New Zealand nine Marist brothers were convicted of child sexual abuse.