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Exclusive: Child sex abuse survivor gets his predator jailed 40 years after he committed multiple sex acts against him in London and Buckinghamshire
Keith Hinchliffe. He contacted me and gave me permission to use his name to encourage other survivors to come forward and get justice in the courts and compensation.
Judge described him as ” an immensely impressive witness, honest, reasonable and composed under pressure”
A child sex abuse survivor has got justice 40 years after he was groomed and sexually assaulted by a paedophile who went on to commit other offences against boys in Holland and a girl in Kent.
Philip Saunders, 67, was sentenced to six years in jail, with the judge saying only a rule that sentences had to reflect the law in the 1980s stopped him from giving him an even longer sentence.
Keith Hinchliffe, now 54, was abused at Saunders home, in his car, in his office at night, at Wembley Stadium and his predator was given open access to Grafton Close children’s home in the London borough of Richmond to take him out to abuse him when he was put in care.. The abuse continued for three years starting when he was 12 until he turned 16. Saunders was 27 at the time.
His case raises questions again about the role of Richmond Council under Liberal Democrat control and the Met Police in the 1980s who took no effective action to stop paedophiles abusing children in the borough. Grafton Close is the same home where a Roman Catholic priest, Tony McSweeney, was jailed for three years for indecent assault after escaping justice for 35 years following a fresh Met Police investigation in 2015. Like Saunders, McSweeney was able to take boys out of the home with the help of John Stingemore, then the deputy manager of the home, who was already a convicted paedophile. Stingemore died before the case got to court. See my blog on this here.
Keith reported the incidents to the Met police when he was at Grafton Close care home in 1984 and allegations that he had been propositioned for sex as a 15 year old by a woman staff worker at the home. The Met interviewed him and decided to take no further action.
Keith plucked up courage in 2019 to report the abuse again after seeing the BBC investigation into paedophile Jimmy Saville and went to the NSPCC who reported it to Thames Valley Police.
Unlike the Met, Thames Valley Police took his claims seriously and the case went to Reading Crown Court where Saunders tried to deny everything but he was convicted last October and sentenced in December.
The judge, recorder John Ryder, in his sentencing remarks in court, told the whole grisly story. He revealed that Saunders, after abusing Keith, went over to the Hague and sexually abused two boys in his care and was sentenced to two years and six months in jail. In 2005 in Maidstone he was jailed for four years for three indecent acts with a young girl, the daughter of his current wife.
Saunders got access to Keith and his family because he was his sister’s boyfriend for about a year. The judge described how he got Keith to stay overnight at his home in Langley and then asked him to sleep in his bed because he claimed the spare bed was broken. The abuse began overnight and then he was given expensive gifts. This included a microcomputer – rare in 1982 – a Raleigh bike and a Michael Jackson DVD, Thriller. He also exploited the boy’s passion for fast cars taking him to test drives and shows.
” unusually expensive gifts were to groom him for sex abuse”
As the judge said: “giving unusually expensive gifts coveted by an adolescent boy and exploitation of his interests were a means of grooming him to sex abuse.”
He also took pictures of him with an Instamatic camera naked or dressed up at his home, in his car, at work and at Wembley Stadium where he took him to see an American football match.
Keith told the Judge if he didn’t comply Saunders , who is six foot four inches tall, became violent.
The judge says he said: “If I didn’t do things, he would let me know. Arm behind back- pain” .”Rebuffed once and pinned to floor and decanter of scotch all over my face as punishment and made to pleasure him again.”
Other times he was plied with drink, forced to watch pornography and forced to perform oral sex on him.
These events made Keith feel both fear and shame and he started skipping school. The judge summed up his evidence as finding “relationships hard. No friends. Initial abuse hard, aftermath is life changing. Did not finish education. Rebelled. Hated the world and everything around me. Navigated life without education guidance and to relive events in court and answer challenges again and again – had almost broken him.” His changed behaviour led him to be put into care by Richmond council.
He was too ashamed to tell his family and feared his father, an ex merchant navy man, would take it out on him if he knew. He has now told his mother, his present wife and has children of his own and has a job as a furniture maker. But he told the police he now regretted never taking exams at school and getting a good job because of the constant abuse from Saunders.
The judge said:
“I found Keith Hinchliffe an immensely impressive witness, honest, reasonable and composed under
pressure about [a] sensitive and damaging experience. Impressive man.” He described him as an ” insightful and measured in expression”. “Trauma and fear and shame shaped his personality and altered [his] outlook on the world.”
The judge was highly critical of Saunders for trying to deny the whole story and showing no remorse for what he had done.
” You continue to deny any sexual activity at all with him.{You] told PSR author only interested in adult female relationships. That assertion is completely contradicted by the facts in the Holland conviction. I have no doubt on the basis of evidence I heard from KH at trial – he suffered substantial and serious psychological harm as result of your actions. {You] abused a position of trust in relation to him.”
The police interview with Keith revealed he partly came forward because he had seen in the media that perpetrators of historic child sexual abuse were now being caught and jailed.
Despite securing a conviction against Saunders he is now having to fight the Met and Richmond Council to get redress. They won’t admit they did anything wrong in the 1980s or had a duty of care towards him. In the second part of this grisly story I will be revealing their responses to him.
London borough of Richmond and the Met Police deny historic child sex abuse after survivor’s predator gets jailed for six years
Met Police says it was not a crime for council staff to proposition children for sex in 1984
Keith Hinchliffe, the child sex abuse survivor, who got his predator sentenced to six years in jail 40 years after he abused him for three years , is facing an uphill battle with the Met Police and the London borough of Richmond to get compensation or even recognition there was a problem.
The Met Police are describing his allegation that he was propositioned for sex by a member of staff at Grafton Close Children’s home as ” not a crime” and the council have employed lawyers and insurers to say it did not fail in its duty of care to look after him.
Keith’s abuser, Phillip Saunders, had open access to the children’s home where he took him out to sexually abuse him and the member of staff propositioned him when she invited him to her flat in return for saying she would help him leave the home early.
Documents show the Met Police has reviewed the allegations he made in 1984 which resulted in ” no further action” but came to the same conclusion again. The documents show that at first Richmond Council tried to say there was no evidence that he was at the home and then because he was not certain whether her name was Christine or Linda they could not trace anybody.
But the most damning finding was that the Met concluded that no crime existed in the first place.
The report said: “You stated ..that you had been propositioned but that the suspect had not touched you or physically sexually abused you. You stated that it was verbal comments only. I agree that crimes of such nature are fully within the public interest, however, there has to have been a crime committed for that interest to exist.”
Detective Sergeant Alex Woolley of the Met Police Child Sex Abuse Investigations Team, wrote to him saying: ”
“In relation to what happened you at Grafton Close, this report has been closed and classified as a “no crime”.
“Clearly the conduct of the member of staff is entirely unacceptable. However, we have to apply the law as it was at the time that the incidents happened. This happened before the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and so we have to consider what legislation is available to us in the 1980s.”
Keith Hinchliffe was very dissatisfied by the decision and has appealed to the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) for a review of the case at the end of October when Saunders was convicted. The office has accepted his complaint but warned him it could take 8 months to get a reply because of a backlog of complaints against the Met.
Richmond’s response has been even more negative. First they questioned whether he had ever been at Grafton and said there were no records showing he was there. Then by pursuing the issue with his local MP and a Freedom of Information request the South London Legal Partnership found a log confirming he had been admitted to Grafton Close and discharged six weeks later. But it said all the social work records at that time had been destroyed. It refused to release any documents on the Fernbridge investigation by the Met into child sexual abuse at Grafton Close home in 2015 which the authority did confirm it had co-operated with the police on the grounds that they were too sensitive because they contained details of third parties involved.
When he persisted in pursuing Richmond over this the council turned the case over to lawyers in Nottingham, Browne Jacobson, an Anglo-Irish firm, who cover business, government and health issues.
The firm in a letter this month set out to demolish Keith’s claims of negligence or breach of duty of care at Grafton Close. It cited case law to exonerate social workers who may be involved in his case and also said he had to meet stringent tests to bring any claim that the staff failed to protect him. One of them included he couldn’t produce documents to show the council’s policies at the time – since the council has destroyed all the records.
You can’t bring a negligence case if there was no duty of care -Richmond Council’s lawyers
The lawyers also said he was out of time to bring a case and they would challenge this in court. They were also sceptical of whether the conviction of Saunders would help. The lawyers wrote to him saying ” a claim in negligence cannot succeed if there is no duty of care in the first place”.
It goes on to say the council have neither admitted or denied the conviction of Mr Saunders but would need a certification of conviction or indictment.
The firm warned him they had agreed to represent Richmond if he brought a case and that he could incur substantial costs and he should take independent legal advice.
Since publication of the first blog I have been contacted by one other resident at Grafton Close suggesting there was a woman member of staff at Grafton Close who did sleep with at least one of the boys there. What Keith is exposing is a cess pit of behaviour which the Met and Richmond Council want to forget.
I don’t think Keith is going to give up on this so I expect there will be further developments. Watch this space.
Richmond child abuse victim criticises Thames Valley Police
A sex crime victim has filed a formal complaint against the police, saying he was left to track down his own abuser after police claimed they couldn’t find him.
Keith Hinchliffe said he found his abuser, who targeted him as a teen in Twickenham, in “a couple of hours”.
Yet police had just closed his case, claiming months of investigations had failed to trace him.
He now knows his abuser was already a convicted paedophile and registered sex offender, meaning he should have been on police databases all along.
Thanks to Keith’s own detective work, Philip John Saunders was convicted of seven sex offences and jailed for six years.
Keith, who now lives in Monmouthshire, Wales, has waived his right to anonymity to tell the Richmond and Twickenham Times about his concerns over the police investigation.
His case was first reported by decorated investigative journalist David Hencke.
Keith’s Story
Keith was sexually abused by Saunders – his older sister’s boyfriend – between 1982 and 1985, between the ages of 13 and 15.
The judge at Saunders’s trial last year said the seven convictions were representative of the “innumerable” instances of abuse which had actually occurred.
The court heard Saunders had threatened and assaulted Keith to keep him quiet.
Keith reacted to the abuse by becoming “erratic” and missing school, the trial was told.
He was removed from his family home and placed in Grafton Close children’s home, Hanworth, Hounslow.
But Saunders simply started showing up there, taking Keith out and continued abusing him.
On one occasion, Keith was abused in Saunders’ car at Wembley Stadium after a sports event.
“Smashed into pieces”
Keith finally reported Saunders’ crimes after the Jimmy Savile revelations triggered high-profile investigations and he slowly realised the impact of his own abuse.
“It’s personality-changing,” he explained. “It affects your decisions. I didn’t go to school. I didn’t get any qualifications. I’ve had depression and anxiety my whole life. I’ve had to have lots of counselling.
“It’s been incredibly difficult, coming to terms with myself and trying to build back at least a part of who I was. Because it completely crushed me – smashed me into pieces as a person.”
The abuse occurred while Keith lived in Fielding Avenue, Twickenham, then Grafton Close, but the case was handed to Thames Valley Police as Saunders lived in Slough in the 1980s.
In a letter seen by this newspaper, the force initially told Keith it was closing his case.
“We have not been able to identify [the correct] Mr Saunders,” a detective inspector wrote.
But, said Keith, he found Saunders within “a couple of hours on the internet.”
“I forwarded that information and they opened the case again,” he said – but it was another “excruciating” year for Saunders to be charged.
Richmond and Twickenham Times: Paedophile Philip John Saunders, 67, of Queens Road in Aylesham, Canterbury, was convicted at Reading Crown Court last year
Paedophile Philip John Saunders, 67, of Queens Road in Aylesham, Canterbury, was convicted at Reading Crown Court last year (Image: NQ)
Justice
Saunders, 67, of Queens Road in Aylesham, Canterbury, was convicted at Reading Crown Court in October of four counts of indecent assault, two counts of indecency with a child and one count of attempted buggery.
The judge called Keith “an immensely impressive witness; honest, reasonable and composed… insightful and measured in expression.”
He had lost a period of his childhood thanks to Saunders, the judge said, and the “trauma and fear and shame shaped his personality” in adulthood.
At the sentencing, it was revealed that in May 1990, Saunders had been jailed for two-and-a-half years in The Netherlands for sexually abusing two boys.
Then, in 2005, he was jailed for four years for sexually abusing a girl in Kent.
When Keith discovered Saunders had been on the sex offenders register all along, he filed a formal complaint over the previous investigators’ failure to locate him.
Thames Valley Police said: “A formal complaint has been made in relation to this and we are in the process of updating the victim with our findings of the investigation.”
Richmond Council, which ran the Grafton Close children’s home, said it couldn’t comment on “ongoing individual claims”.
But Keith said he has not filed any legal claim against the council.
‘I was sexually abused then sent to a children’s home where a staff member asked me for sex’
When Keith Hinchliffe started misbehaving due to horrendous sexual abuse at the hands of a family friend, he was sent to a children’s home that later proved to be a hotbed of child sexual abuse. Forty years later he is telling his story.
A child sexual abuse victim sent to a care home at the centre of a paedophile scandal claims he was asked to have sex by an adult member of staff there. Keith Hinchliffe, then aged 13 and living in Richmond, was sexually abused by his sister’s 27-year-old ex-boyfriend, Philip Saunders, from 1982, then spent around six weeks at Richmond Council-run Grafton Close children’s home in late 1984.
Saunders, now 67, had become a trusted family friend after breaking up with Keith’s sister. He groomed him by showering him with expensive gifts, including a micro-computer and a top-of-the-range Raleigh bicycle. The serious sexual offences were accompanied by threats and physical domination.
Keith, now 54, bottled the horrific sexual abuse and, he says, became ‘a nightmare’ at home and school. In November 1984, by then aged 15, he was sent to Grafton Close care home, in Hounslow, where he claims an adult member of staff promised to move him out quickly if they had sex with him. Keith, who did not take him up on his offer, has bravely waived his anonymity to share his story with MyLondon because he believes he was not the only boy to receive the proposal.
Grafton Close hit headlines in 2013 when Catholic priest, Father Tony McSweeney, was charged, and later jailed for three years, for abusing a boy at the home. McSweeney was arrested as part of the Operation Fernbridge probe into allegations that Elm Guest House, in Barnes, was home to a VIP paedophile ring that preyed on boys from nearby Grafton Close.
The home’s manager, John Stingemore, was also charged with indecently assaulting young boys, but died, aged 72, at his home in Sussex weeks before the trial was due to start. Keith doesn’t remember either McSweeney or Stingemore in particular.
At the time, Richmond MP Zac Goldsmith said abuse victims had been denied justice and ‘that source of information has been cut off’.
After McSweeney was sentenced in 2015, the Operation Fernbridge investigation into the Elm Guest House was taken over by Operation Athabasca. In the 2019 Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), Met Police Commander Neil Jerome confirmed the Athabasca’s findings that ‘no credible victim has ever come forward alleging a specific offence suffered whilst at Elm Guest House’.
Meanwhile, in 2014, under a separate probe called Operation Midland, the Met began investigating the claims of Carl Beech, a man who claimed he had been abused by a VIP paedophile ring at the Dolphin Square estate in Westminster. Beech turned out to be a fantasist, and a paedophile himself, and he was jailed for 18 years in 2019 for perverting the course of justice.
Beech’s made-up allegations damaged reputations and made a mockery of the Operation Midland investigation, which was closed and ended with apologies to the living suspects. Keith says the hoax was ‘horrendous’ and ‘completely destroyed’ the credibility of other victims. But now he claims the effect of the fallout has put the Met off pursuing his own allegation about the staff member at Grafton Close.
‘Talking about it was not easy, but now I have – I have found a voice’
Against the backdrop of the Jimmy Savile scandal, multiple police operations, and a child sexual abuse enquiry, 40 years after he was abused, Keith bravely stepped forward and reported Saunders to the Met and Thames Valley Police in 2019. In October last year, Saunders was convicted by a jury at Reading Crown Court for seven offences committed against Keith in Langley, Slough, and Wembley between 1982 and 1985.
“Coming forward was about speaking about my experiences. It’s what happened to me and I felt it was time to come forward and speak out and let people know. I am not ashamed of what happened to me. It was a crap experience, it was horrible, and affected my whole life. Talking about it was not easy, but now I have – I have found a voice,” said Keith.
As he jailed Saunders for six years, Recorder John Ryder called Keith an ‘immensely impressive witness, honest, reasonable and composed under pressure about a sensitive and damaging experience’.
Keith told the jury how he was introduced to Saunders by his older sister, that they bonded over cars and drives in his Ford Capri, then, after they split, the abuse started. Saunders remained a family friend and invited Keith to his house where he used the excuse of a broken spare bed to make him sleep with him.
“He pulled down my pants and played with my genitals. The next morning he made an excuse and apologised. He said he was half-asleep and thought he was in bed with his girlfriend,” Keith recalled of the first incident.
The abuse escalated and was often followed by cash gifts or days out. Recorder Ryder said Saunders exerted a ‘mental hold’ over Keith, for example forcing him to pose naked in front of Wembley Stadium. The one time Keith tried to fight back, he was pinned to the floor and covered in a decanter of Scotch, then made to pleasure Saunders again.
“You are under his constant threat the whole time. If anyone finds out or you tell anyone, there’s a threat of violence. He was a big guy,” Keith said.
The vile abuse had the effect of turning a ‘quiet boy who was well-behaved’ into a confused and erratic child who missed school and acted out at home. This was why Keith ended up at Grafton Close, where, he says, Saunders continued to access him for abuse another three to four times.
After that, Keith got older friends who helped insulate him from Saunders’ control. “He probably realised they would figure out what was going on, and I was probably too old for him. By then he could find another child to abuse elsewhere and now we know that is what he did,” Keith said.
When Keith got to the trial, he had no idea Saunders had already been convicted of child sex offences against three more victims. In 1990, at The Hague in The Netherlands, Saunders was jailed for two years six months for indecent acts with two minor boys, and in 2005, in Maidstone in Kent, he was jailed for four years for indecency with a young girl.
In December last year, Recorder Ryder was limited to the sentencing powers of the 1956 laws for sex offences against children, which carried much more lenient sentences. What would be considered rape of a child under 13 now, carrying a maximum of life, was then indecent assault of a male, which carried a maximum of 10 years.
Keith said: “For him to serve three years for what he did to me is extraordinary. I felt defeated by the end of it. You live with this for your whole life and in effect he gets three years. What’s going to stop him coming out and doing it again. Three years is nothing inside. The guy should have been locked up forever a long time ago.”
‘They propositioned me’
After building the courage to speak out, only to feel ‘defeated’ by the end of a gruelling trial, Keith is determined to shine a light on Grafton Close children’s home in the hope other victims of sexual abuse might speak out.
So far there are two other known victims from the home. David Harris was awarded a pay-out by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) in 2022, after disclosing he had been repeatedly sexually assaulted and given alcohol by the home’s manager, Stingemore, in the 1980s. He stepped forward after reading about his friend, Peter Hatton-Bornshin, who took his own life after he too was abused at the home.
Keith called the home an ‘open prison’ and remembers his time there as ‘completely isolated’. While he was never molested by any staff at the home, he says an alleged proposition, and the manner in which it was done, brings Richmond Council’s duty of care into question, and raises the possibility other staff members, aside from Stingemore and McSweeney, were abusing children.
“They propositioned me,” Keith recalled. “We had meetings every so often to discuss how you are feeling and what’s going on, and they said to me if I was prepared to have sex with them they would get me released quicker from the home. They would write a report to say I did not need to be there. That was exactly what they did.
“They made it very clear they were interested in me on a sexual basis. I can say that because I was being abused [by Saunders]. You do not just come and approach a 15-year-old for sex if you have never done it before. It was not the first occasion. They were pretty confident.”
Keith never had sex with the staff member, but he was still moved out of the home in only six weeks. When he told this part of his story to the Metropolitan Police in 2020, he says they told him no crime was committed. He has now made a complaint to the force, but it could be over a year until he hears back.
When MyLondon asked the Met about this, a spokesperson told us: “Police were contacted on Friday 1 May 2020 by a man regarding his time at an address in Hounslow in the mid-1980s. Following extensive enquiries no offences or suspects were identified and the case was later closed. The man was informed.”
While Keith is awaiting the outcome of his police complaint, he has been locked in a battle with Richmond Council to find out more about his time at the home. It took multiple requests under data laws to get a copy of the acceptance book and ledger – that show he was at the home when he said he was – with the council either giving flat refusals or telling him documents had been destroyed.
Now Keith is trying to get hold of the ‘green sheets’ which would show logs of his daily activities and who he was with. He believes these could prove negligence on the part of Richmond Council, who he alleges allowed Saunders to access him for sexual abuse when they should have been protecting him.
David Davies MP, who represents Keith constituency in Wales, previously wrote to Richmond Council asking them to disclose the ‘green sheets’ and notes from Keith’s social worker, but the council continues to claim his records have been destroyed.
When MyLondon asked Richmond Council about their duty of candour, a spokesperson said: “Richmond Council has provided Mr Hinchliffe with evidence that he was in care at Grafton Close between September and November 1984. We have not been able to provide him with any further information relating to his time in care as any records held would have been destroyed after his 25th birthday, in compliance with the legal retention period at the time.”
Keith looks back in horror at the lack of safeguarding in the 1980s, and says what went on in the children’s homes was ‘shocking’. The spectre of his abuse has twice led him to suicide attempts, and his first marriage broke down in 2015. His experiences have also left him feeling ‘overprotective’ of his own son.
“I have a lack of trust in anyone else that’s with him. I don’t think I know anything different,” Keith said. “When you have been abused and mistreated the way I have, you can read people quickly and you know who is right and who is wrong. I have had a gut feeling before and said to someone something about them is not quite right, and then years later it turned out they were not quite right.”
This ‘gut feeling’ is the same one driving Keith to find out more about Grafton Close. While documents about his time there are not disclosed, questions will continue to linger over who else may have been propositioned by staff there, and over the failures to protect some of London’s most vulnerable children.
MyLondon asked Thames Valley Police for a mugshot of Philip Saunders, of Queens Road, Aylesham in Canterbury, Kent, but the force did not have one.
Got a story or a court case we should cover? Please email callum.cuddeford@reachplc.com or WhatsApp 07580255582
Met Police can’t trace Richmond social worker in sex case
A man who says he was repeatedly sexually propositioned by a social worker as a teenager has expressed annoyance after police dropped his case, saying they couldn’t identify the woman.
Keith Hinchliffe accused the Metropolitan Police Service of carrying out a lacklustre investigation and said he has since heard that others have previously filed criminal complaints about the same woman.
He also described Richmond Council’s response to his allegations as “shocking”, saying that when he informed the authority of his abuse, he received legal letters warning him against suing.
Keith, who has waived his right to anonymity, reported to police in 2020 that he was targeted by two paedophiles in the 1980s.
“I spent a lot of time toying with the idea and what the impacts might be to people around me,” he said.
“But I thought, I’ve got to do it. I’ve got to make sure this comes out… I can’t keep this with me forever.”
The male paedophile who abused him, Philip John Saunders (67, of Queens Road, Aylesham), was prosecuted last year and jailed for six years after a Thames Valley Police investigation.
The judge described Keith as “an immensely impressive witness; honest, reasonable and composed”.
Investigation
But the Richmond Council social worker Keith says repeatedly propositioned him in the 1980s remains at large.
“She made it very clear that she was attracted to me,” he alleged, adding that she offered to write beneficial reports about him if he would sleep with her.
The Met confirmed it was contacted in May 2020 about the alleged incidents, but no suspect was identified so the case was closed.
“I did two two-hour interviews with them and it took them a year to come back and say they weren’t taking any further action,” Keith complained.
His case was given to a PC, he said, not a detective.
“In my view, he wasn’t equipped,” Keith continued. “Every time I tried to contact him, he was either out of the office, on a training course or something else.
“After I spoke to the council, I found out he didn’t even ask for staff records.”
Contacted by this newspaper, the Met has insisted it had conducted “extensive enquiries” but could not trace the suspect.
Keith Hinchliffe reported the incidents involving the Richmond social worker to police in 2020, but they said they couldn’t identify her (Image: Keith Hinchliffe)
Grafton Close
Keith said he subsequently wrote to Richmond Council to complain about the social worker’s sexual advances.
He had come to the attention of social services when he began misbehaving and truanting in response to his abuse by Saunders – his older sister’s boyfriend, who molested him for several years.
He also complained that his abuse by Saunders continued even in a Richmond Council care home he briefly stayed in.
Keith spent around six weeks in Grafton Close, Hounslow, and said Saunders was able to collect him for days out, during which he abused Keith.
Saunders’ trial last year heard he used threats and violence to stop Keith reporting the abuse.
“He should never have had access to me,” Keith said of his time at Grafton. “He wasn’t a family member.”
After writing to the council, he said, he received legal letters saying any lawsuit would be without merit.
“They just fire solicitors’ letters at you,” he said.
“Shocking”
The council asked him for the date of birth and national insurance number of the social worker who propositioned him – information he said it was unreasonable to expect him to possess.
“It’s something I’ve harboured for so long,” he said. “I thought once I divulged it, something would have to be done about it – but it wasn’t and it was really disappointing.
“I’m going public and waiving my anonymity to highlight that this went on and this is how the council deal with it.
“In my view, if someone reports this to the council, they should be looking into it. But they just ignore it and get solicitors to deal with it. And that’s shocking. It’s extraordinary.
“All they’re doing is protecting the name of the council. They’re protecting their own jobs, if you like… They don’t want it highlighted.”
Approached for comment, Richmond Council said it was “unable to comment on ongoing individual claims”.
However, Keith said that while he is considering legal action, there is presently no such claim.
“It’s starting, to me, to look like a cover-up,” he said.
The council said its current child protection procedures involved “rigorous checks and controls”.