After Birmingham, They Gave Him The BBC

Sir Michael Lyons Chaired the BBC Trust and Advised Ministers on Public Accountability. He Was Also Running Birmingham City Council When It Voted Down an Inquiry Into a Suppressed Child Rape Report.

He Has Never Been Asked What He Knew. The National Inquiry Should Change That.

Let me introduce you to Sir Michael Lyons.

Knighted in 2001 for services to local government. One of the most influential figures in British public administration of his generation.

He chaired the Lyons Inquiry into Local Government Finance for the UK Government between 2004 and 2007. He served as Chairman of the BBC Trust from 2011 to 2014, overseeing the governance and accountability of the BBC itself. He spent decades advising governments on how public institutions should function and be held to account. Today he chairs the government's New Towns Taskforce, advising ministers on the creation of a new generation of towns as part of the UK's long-term housing strategy.

In other words, he became one of the country's most senior figures responsible for holding powerful institutions to account.

So why am I telling you this?

Because this week I published an investigation showing that Birmingham City Council commissioned research in 1990 documenting the sexual exploitation of girls in its care. The study was carried out by Dr Jill Jesson of Aston University and completed in 1991.

According to Jesson, references linking the exploitation to the private hire trade were removed from the report by a steering group overseeing the research. All reference to ethnicity was removed too. She was told her methodology was flawed and ordered to erase the connection entirely. The planned seminar to discuss the findings was cancelled. The full report was never properly published. Copies were ordered destroyed.

The cover up did not end there.

In December 1995, Birmingham City Council's Social Services Committee debated whether there should be a full inquiry into what had happened to the Jesson research.

The motion was voted down.

Sir Michael Lyons had been Chief Executive of Birmingham City Council since 1994. He would remain the most senior official running that authority until 2001. He was in post when the council voted to bury the question of what had happened to a suppressed child rape report.

The Gang Rape of Little White Girls Did Not Stop

In 2010, West Midlands Police produced a confidential problem profile warning that hundreds of children in Birmingham were considered at risk of sexual exploitation. The document was never made public. It took a Freedom of Information request by the Birmingham Mail in 2015 to force it into the open. Nearly two decades after the Jesson research first identified the pattern, police had documented the same problem, compared it explicitly to Rotherham, and chosen not to tell the public it existed.

The council buried the research in 1991. The police buried their own intelligence in 2010. Both sets of evidence were suppressed. Both were eventually forced out by journalists rather than by the institutions themselves.

That is not two separate failures. That is a pattern. Which means the questions are not historical. They are direct.

• How many little White girls were gang raped by Pakistani men while Lyons was running the council?
• What did his administration do to address the warnings that already existed when he took the role?
• Why did Birmingham emerge from his tenure with the problem not only unresolved but apparently worsening?
• And what did he know about the Jesson report, the suppression of its findings, and the 1995 vote that closed the door on any inquiry?

Institutions do not make decisions on their own. People do. And if the national inquiry into grooming gangs is serious, the people who ran those institutions at the time must be required to answer for what happened.

Sir Michael Lyons ran Birmingham City Council from 1994 to 2001. He was in post when the 1995 vote was cast. He went on to hold some of the most prominent public positions in British institutional life. His reputation rests on a career built around accountability, governance and the proper functioning of public institutions.

He has never once been asked publicly what he knew about the Jesson report or the cover up of the gang rape of little White girls by the Council he was responsible for.

The national inquiry has the power to compel testimony. It has the power to require answers under oath.

Sir Michael Lyons should be called to give evidence.

I'm Raja Miah MBE. You won't see me on the BBC or read my work in the legacy press. That's not an accident.

For seven years I led a campaign exposing how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry. This investigation into Birmingham is the next front in that same fight.

Everything I publish is free. No paywalls. Because the truth shouldn't belong only to those who can afford it. But I'll be honest with you. Tens of thousands of people read this work every week. A small and shrinking number support it financially. Without that support, this work stops.

The national inquiry we forced will almost certainly become a cover-up. The people who buried the evidence are already positioning themselves to manage what comes next. Exposing that, and making sure the victims are not betrayed again, is going to take years. Possibly another five.

Sir Michael Lyons has never been asked what he knew. The councillors who voted down the 1995 inquiry have never been named in public. The girls in those files have never had anyone demand answers on their behalf.

That is what this work is for.

If you believe it matters, please support it. Even a small amount keeps this going when institutions, politicians and the legacy press are all working to make sure voices like mine disappear.

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The people we are naming have lawyers, platforms and power. All I have is the truth and the people who refuse to let it be buried.

Raja 🙏