High Court considers legal challenge to government “failure” to implement recommendations of Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse

The case, being heard today and tomorrow (10 and 11 November) by Mr Justice Mansfield, concerns 20 key recommendations issued by the IICSA to better protect children across the UK from sexual abuse.

These include properly collecting data relating to child abusers and victims of abuse and exploitation, ending the use of pain-inducing restraint techniques on children in custody and regulation of staff in children’s homes.

On 5 March 2026, Mr Justice Kimblin granted The Maggie Oliver Foundation permission to proceed to a full judicial review, describing the challenge as “a paradigm example of public interest litigation.”

The Court found that there was an arguable case that the Government's failure to ban pain-inducing techniques on children in custody is unlawful, and granted permission for that argument to be tested at the full judicial review hearing.

The Court also granted permission for the Foundation to pursue its argument that repeated assurances from senior ministers across successive governments about acting on IICSA's recommendations created a ‘legitimate expectation’ that those commitments would be honoured.

Maggie Oliver, former detective and founder and Chair of The Maggie Oliver Foundation, said: “Public inquiries ask an enormous amount of people. Survivors are asked to revisit some of the most traumatic and devastating experiences of their lives and share them with strangers, often in extraordinary detail. They do that in the hope that what happened to them will be properly understood, lessons will be learned and changes will follow so that other children are better protected from suffering the same devastating, life-changing harm as they did.

“That is an enormous amount of trust to place in a process. Governments say that they are listening. Reports are written. Recommendations are made. Promises then follow…..these promises are meaningless without the action needed to bring them into being.

“We want to challenge a system in which commitments made after public inquiries can be allowed to fade away and totally disappear once the headlines have moved on.”

Independent charity Article 39 has also been granted permission to intervene in the case, with its intervention focussing on the government’s failure to prohibit the use of pain-inducing restraint on children in custody.

The charity said: “Our intervention draws on our longstanding work challenging the deliberate infliction of pain on children in custody, highlighting the serious physical and psychological harm caused by these techniques, the inadequacy of existing safeguards, and the significant barriers children face in recognising, reporting and challenging abuse in institutional settings.

“We firmly believe that the deliberate infliction of pain on children is a form of child abuse and that its continued authorisation is incompatible with children’s rights to protection from violence, abuse and degrading treatment.”

Lottie Winson