CULTURE Secretary Lisa Nandy has defended the appointment of Baroness Longfield, amid criticism from survivors that they had not been consulted in advance.
Nandy told GB News: “Well, I’ve known Anne Longfield for over 20 years. I first met her when I was at the Children’s Society working with children, including very early the victims of some of those grooming gang scandals, and she was a fearless and fierce advocate for children and young people then, speaking truth to power, and she’s never ceased from that.
“So I believe she’s absolutely the right person to do this inquiry, not just to get answers, but to get the action that has been denied to survivors of the grooming gangs for too long. But I do completely understand why so many survivors are sceptical about people in positions of authority.
“They’ve been let down over and over again. We’ve got to earn back their trust. We’ve got to earn their confidence by taking the action that they’ve been denied for too long, and I believe that Anne is precisely the right person to do that.
“Look, there’ll be different views amongst victims and survivors, and they are perfectly entitled to express those views, and we will, of course, always listen, but we promised action, and like you said at the very beginning, these things take too long, and for too long, people have been denied not just answers but action.
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“That’s why we’ve named Anne Longfield as the chair of this inquiry, and she is meeting with victims and survivors this week to make sure that from the word go, they’re at the centre of this process so that we get the right outcome.”
Asked about the NAO report on the asylum system today, she said: “Well, the immigration system that we’ve had has not been fit for purpose.
“For some time, we inherited a chaotic system from the last government who lost control of the borders, and the public need to have much greater confidence and trust in their immigration system. We’ve already taken steps to deal with this, including driving down the asylum backlog so that if people don’t have the right to be here, we can remove them.
“We hit record numbers of deportations in our first year in office. But today, the Deputy Prime Minister is in Strasbourg dealing with another problem with the system that we inherited, which is that the human rights framework, which is important, which protects people who need safety and sanctuary, is too often being used to game the system and prevent governments, successive governments, from getting control of the borders.
“Now we think that that is a major problem that is undermining public trust, and David Lammy is over in Strasbourg today urging European leaders to work with us to make changes to that system.”