Criticisms relate to two incidents between 2014 and 2016.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) has accused the Green Party of England and Wales of prioritising their public image over child safety in the way they reacted to two incidents between 2014 and 2016.

The report says: “The Green Party saw allegations of child sexual abuse as primarily a communications issue – about protecting the reputation of the Party – rather than a safeguarding one.”

The report criticism relates to the party’s handling of an allegation of child sexual abuse against a general election candidate in 2014 and child sexual abuse charges being brought against a party member in 2016.

The latter incident was when Coventry Green Party member David Challenor was charged with raping and torturing a child he kept in his attic.

The IICSA report echoed a previous Verita report which found Challenor’s daughter, a party member called Aimee Challenor, failed to report these charges to the party as a safeguarding issue.

Both reports criticised Aimee Challenor for appointing her father as her election agent despite the charges against him.

David Challenor was later found guilty and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Aimee Challenor joined the Liberal Democrats but was suspended after her fiancee’s twitter account posted fantasies about sexually abusing children. She claimed his account was hacked.

The IICSA report also criticises the Green Party’s reaction to a November 2014 email from a member of the public accusing one of the party’s 2015 general election candidates of being a “serial pedophile”.

The complainant, who has been anonymised in the report, says this candidate was a teacher before he was sacked for “inappropriate relations with a student”.

The complainant adds the candidate has an “arrest record for underage sex with young girls” and says she herself had had to have rape counselling for what he did to her when she was 15.

Both the complainant and the candidate have been anonymised but, in her November 2014 email, the complainant said the candidate was “discreetly deselected as deputy leader”.

For legal reasons, Left Foot Forward is not naming the individual it believes to be the candidate but he remained a candidate for the party in the 2015 general election.

The complainant also said in their email that they would contact the Daily Mail about the candidate’s “history of underage sex with the girls he taught”. Her email was forwarded from Adam Stacey, then membership officer of the Green Party, to Chris Luffingham, then the party’s executive director.

In the email, Stacey said: “Here’s that email. Contacting the Daily Mail is what she said she would do. And one thing I remembered incorrectly, it says ‘arrest record’ not ‘conviction'”.

When responding to the inquiry, the Green Party Executive’s current chair Liz Reason said it appeared that the response of “key officers” to the email’s allegations was to speak to the candidate to establish that no child sexual abuse charges had been brought against him.

Reason does not say that any action was taken to investigate the complainant’s allegations that the candidate had been sacked for innapropriate behavour with a pupil and had been arrested on suspicion of underage sex with young girls.

Reason also did not say that any action was taken against the candidate. He remained a member until 2019. She said the current safeguarding team was continuing to investigate the reasons for the party’s reaction in 2014.

The report criticises the party’s response to this email. It says: “The information contained in this email appears not to have been dealt with in accordance with appropriate safeguarding and child protection procedures. If it is correct that the only action taken was to speak to the member concerned, it supports the Verita findings [which concerned the 2016 Challenor case] that the Green Party saw allegations of child sexual abuse as primarily a communications issue – about protecting the reputation of the Party – rather than a safeguarding one.”

Liz Reason also said that, when Stacey and Luffingham stopped working for the party, their emails were archived and not accessible. Luffingham stopped working for the Greens in October 2015. The report says archiving these emails was “a failing”.

In November 2018, the inquiry sent a copy of the complainant’s initial email to the Green Party. In response to this, in March 2019, the candidate (who by then had no position of power in the party) was suspended. Shortly after his suspension, he resigned from the party.

Reason apologised for the party’s response to the 2014 email and said the party was a “larger, more professional party” than it was in 2014. The party’s chief executive Nick Martin made a similar claim in response to the Verita report.

However, the report says the party’s safeguarding problems were not fixed. “From the evidence we heard from Liz Reason,” it said, “safeguarding issues remain a matter which the Green Party needs to address.”

The report adds that they heard evidence from the Green Party “which indicated that there are major gaps in the practical knowledge of even senior people about basic safeguarding. Some of these people considered themselves sufficiently qualified to judge whether abuse is serious enough to be reported to the authorities.”

On the other hand, the party is praised in the report for having detailled policies and procedures.

Other politicians and political parties are also criticised for in the wide-ranging report.

Commenting on this article, a Green Party spokesperson told Left Foot Forward: “We approach our responsibilities concerning child protection and safeguarding with the utmost seriousness. Reflecting this, we put in place a new safeguarding policy which took effect from Spring 2019.

“The Inquiry’s comments about the need for further safeguarding work refer to our previous safeguarding policy, which applied before Spring 2019. Our new safeguarding policy builds on lessons learnt from the incidents considered by the Inquiry, and has been drawn up in consultation with safeguarding experts.”

“We know that safeguarding is an area that needs regular organisational review and we are committed to continuing to learn and to update and improve our policy in line with emerging best practice. We will be looking very carefully at any IICSA recommendations as part of that review process.”

Joe Lo is a co-editor of Left Foot Forward

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