Richard Scorer

Richard Scorer is a lawyer in Slater and Gordon Lawyers in Manchester where he is head of the abuse team.He was formerly Head of Serious Injury at Pannone solicitors.

He has represented hundreds of child abuse victims in cases against local authorities, schools and churchesand was a founder of the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers. He acted for some of the victims of John Worboys.He now acts for some of the victims of John Smyth in their claim against the Titus Trust.

In his book about abuse in the Catholic Church he presented a selection of case histories running from the 1960s to the present day, including that of John Tolkien.He gave some credit to the efforts of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and Cardinal Vincent Nichols, but the picture he painted was not optimistic.His case is that the Church continued to deny and ignore the scandal of child sexual abuse and he criticised it for the inadequate support it provided for victims. He shows how victims were disbelieved and offending priests were moved to different parishes where they found new boys to abuse and then given the chance to vanish before the law closed in. He said that the Papal document Crimen sollicitationis showed that the Church systematically covered up abuse and tried to silence victims.

He represents 61 people, five of them victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the Birmingham archdiocese, including former pupils of Downside School and Ampleforth College before the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. He criticized Cardinal Nichols, who paid out £15,000 to a victim of Tolkien, for a lack of disclosure.He says that the schools suppressed concerns about abuse because of fears about their reputation as they relived on fee paying.This made them "honeypots" for multiple offenders.

He was concerned that the inquiry should recognise that abuse at Benedictine schools was not only in the past and called for Richard Farnell, the former leader of Rochdale Council to be prosecuted for perjury when he was found to have lied under oath to the inquiry.he said that staff attitudes in the council had improved but that Rochdale political culture was still stuck in a backwards timewarp and remained in desperate need of reform.

He has written extensively about the work of the inquiry for the National Secular Society, of which he is vice-president.

David Steel was suspended from his membership of the Liberal Democrat Party in 2019 after he admitted to the inquiry that he had known about Cyril Smith's child abuse.Scorer said “His failure to stop Smith in 1979, allowing him to go on and abuse more young boys, is inexcusable and he must be held to account." He called for him to be stripped of his peerage.

He denounced the Church of England saying that it had orchestrated years of institutional cover-up and denial and could not be trusted to put its own house in order.It had created a perfect environment in which abusers could flourish.He called for an independent body to be set up which could investigate allegations of abuse and override bishops who were unwilling to comply with their responsibilities.He said that Bishop Peter Ball had found his fellow bishops to be the “perfect accomplices, prepared to turn a blind eye to his abuse over many decades”.

He attacked proposals to dispense with local safeguarding children’s boards in the Children and Social Work Bill, because there would be no statutory obligation to involve all the relevant agencies.

• APIL Guide to Child Abuse Compensation Claims (withElizabeth-Anne Gumbal QC, and Malcolm Johnson, 2011
• Betrayed - The English Catholic Church and the sex abuse crisis, Biteback Publishing, 2014