Church of England officials ‘turned blind eye’ to child abuse claims

Lincolnshire Police and Lincoln Diocese investigated 25 people over alleged abuse, from a list of 53 names which were passed to officers, with three cases leading to convictions.

The BBC’s Panorama said some of the names could have been referred years earlier as part of the Church of England’s national Past Cases Review, which examined tens of thousands of church records in 2008 and 2009 to discover whether abuse cases had slipped through the net.

Not all of the names on the list related to child abuse allegations.

Detective Superintendent Rick Hatton, who leads the ongoing investigation, named Operation Redstone, told a Panorama programme being broadcast on Monday: “We whittled it down to about 25 names whereby we either knew that they’d committed offences or there was some issue around risk to members of the public from them.

“There was the ongoing concern that actually those people were working with children. Potentially there was still a risk.

“Just because they are what we call non-recent cases, doesn’t make them any less serious.

“In fact it makes them more serious because they weren’t dealt with at the time, so there’s a risk from the offender ongoing.”

The programme will claim two former Lincoln Diocese bishops were made aware of abuse concerns at the time, but failed to act.

ln, was told in 1969 that Roy Griffiths, a deputy head teacher at Lincoln…