David Tombs, a former social services official who ran Hereford and Worcester social services for 20 years, has claimed that his warnings about a paedophile network in Whitehall were ignored by the Department of Health because there were “too many of them” in the government.
Tombs said that after the arrest of Peter Righton, a former consultant to the National Children’s Bureau and convicted paedophile, he alerted the Department of Health about a potential network of paedophiles in Whitehall. However, civil servants told him he was “probably wasting his time” because there were “too many of them over there”.
Righton, who died in 2007, was the founder of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and was convicted of importing child pornography in 1992. Tim Yeo, a junior health minister in the early 1990s, refuted Tombs’ claims, describing them as “incredible” and questioning why Tombs did not take his concerns further at the time.
Former detective Terry Shutt also claimed that material discovered after Righton’s arrest, which implicated other establishment figures, had been covered up. In response, Home Secretary Theresa May this week launched two inquiries into historic child sex abuse allegations, including one into abuse by prominent public figures in the 1980s and another into how public bodies handled such claims.
