Behind the publication of Dame Janet Smith’s and Dame Linda Dobbs’s independent reports into Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall and the BBC was a team of lawyers who spent thousands of hours interviewing, investigating, researching, assessing documents and assisting with the reports.
The team from Reed Smith knew that everything we did would be in the full glare of publicity and that everything produced by us — from press updates to the 1,220 pages of the reports themselves — would be subject to close scrutiny. Every fact at every stage had to be particularly carefully verified and anybody who approached us had to be responded to promptly. Every legal issue had to be thoroughly researched and every piece of evidence had to be weighed to establish its relevance and whether it needed to be passed on to the police on the basis that it might constitute evidence of a criminal offence.
An assignment as challenging as this is a career rarity, both given the intense national interest, its subject matter and its time span. We had to go back up to 50 years to understand how BBC programmes were produced and even had to recreate the layouts of some studios in buildings that have been destroyed. Yet we also had to contend with a very modern media landscape where social media fuels traditional media output. We had to be utterly forensic. A significant challenge was avoiding the use of hindsight; it was always important to assess the evidence by reference to the values of society at the relevant time. There could never be an excuse for what Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall did, but some attitudes had to be placed in their historical context.
Interviews were sometimes highly emotional and difficult for the victims and survivors, requiring great care by the lawyers involved so that they could extract facts in a manner that was thorough but always empathetic. No lawyer working on this extraordinary assignment was not moved by what the witnesses told us and no lawyer failed to admire their extraordinary generosity and resilience. Society owes them a great debt.
At the head of all this were two eminent former judges who brought great professionalism and wisdom to the process. The end result is reports that are thorough and well argued and that highlight very important lessons.
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The thing that inquiries of this nature do best is to establish facts. Not all inquiries bring about change. However, I believe that these reports will, in time, do just this.
Richard Spafford, a partner in Reed Smith LLP, led the team advising Dame Janet Smith and Dame Linda Dobbs on the reports into Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall in connection with the BBC