Paedophile advised Home Office on reforms to children's care homes

Peter Righton, a founding member of the Paedophile Information Exchange, gave "considerable assistance" to the report created in 1970

Peter Righton had advised the government on care home reforms (PA)

A paedophile who worked as a child protection and care worker expert advised the Home Office on children’s homes, it has been revealed.

Peter Righton, who died in 2007, advised the government on reforms to the care home system in 1970, for a report that detailed how new homes should be controlled by local government.

Righton, who was one of the founding members of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) lobby group, had also been a consultant for charity the National Children's Bureau as well as a Governor at the New Barns School, Gloucester.

He had previously left a teaching job elsewhere following child abuse complaints, the BBC reports, and was also later convicted, in 1992, for possession of child abuse images, being fined £900.

According to an insider, Righton gave “considerable assistance” to the governmental report, which credited him as an academic who helped to carve out plans for the training of care home workers.

As part of his research, he would travel to numerous residential centres across the UK, the former care worker told the BBC.

“He [would] go and interview, in approved schools, individual boys and he certainly went to speak to the heads of homes,” the retired source said.

“He was a very dangerous man because he was put in a position where he could abuse trust.”

Righton had allegedly admitted taking “boys out” as well as having used “sexual” language with them, not the kind “that you would have in a healthy conversation with a child”.

An independent inquiry has been set-up by Home Secretary Theresa May to investigate allegations of child abuse within the British establishment, including the police, courts, NHS and government.

The measure was announced in July following a campaign by some MPs and the independent panel will report on its interim findings before the general election in May.

Righton previously wrote academic essays justifying sexual relationships with children and also visited Bryn Estyn home in north Wales, which had been the location of extensive abuse in the Seventies and Eighties.