Lawyers' fees in Care Enquiry nearly £14m

Wednesday 14 June 2017

Nearly two thirds of the multi-million budget for the Independent Jersey Care Enquiry has been spent on legal fees.

States expenditure on an independent investigation into allegations of historic child abuse on the Island totalled £21,632,184 as of February this year, information obtained under the Freedom of Information Law has revealed.

Of that total, however, £13,769,805 – around 63% - had been ploughed into lawyers’ fees.

Those fees included legal experts acting for the Inquiry Panel, States departments, witnesses and other interested parties.

Within the States, Home Affairs legal expenditure was highest at just over £1.5 million, while Health and Social Services have so far spent £258,022.

Launched in 2014, the Jersey Care Inquiry was set up to investigate the abuse of children in the Island’s care system over many years and to find answers for those affected.

Pictured: Haut de la Garenne, a former children's home where much of the historic abuse was alleged to have taken place.

The results of that investigation – labelled by Chair Frances Oldham QC as a “robust and fearless” examination, which has worked with hundreds of witnesses to uncover the scale of the abuse – will be published on 3 July this year.

Expected to stretch into hundreds, if not thousands, of pages, the States will have a two-day in-committee meeting – a States Assembly sitting that doesn’t follow the usual speech rules – to consider the full report.