Survivors of the abuse and trafficking linked to Mohamed Al-Fayed recently met with the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, to raise concerns about the scope of the Metropolitan Police investigation, including the absence of a clear trafficking focus despite the scale of the allegations. The minister stressed the need to avoid prejudicing ongoing inquiries, while acknowledging that public inquiries and police investigations are unlikely to deliver justice. Set against the visible urgency of the UK’s response to Jeffrey Epstein, the contrast raises broader questions about how justice is delivered – and for whom.
When a minister expresses scepticism that public inquiries and police investigations can deliver justice, it raises a question that is difficult to ignore: if those are the state’s primary tools for accountability, what exactly is meant to deliver justice? “No justice” is not an acceptable outcome. Not where harm may still be continuing elsewhere. Not where the same patterns could still be operating today.
Recent events have shown what the British state is capable of when it chooses to act. In response to the fallout from Jeffrey Epstein’s network, police forces across the UK have coordinated their efforts, reviewing evidence across jurisdictions and pursuing new lines of inquiry. The Metropolitan Police commissioner, Mark Rowley, has personally sought access to material from the United States. There have been arrests, searches and a clear sense of momentum.
At a political level, the tone has matched the action. In Hastings, the prime minister said in relation to the Epstein victims: “We will not look away, we will not shrug our shoulders.” It is a statement that suggests urgency, resolve and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. And yet, set against that, the response to the case of Mohamed Al-Fayed feels markedly different.
Still not being treated as a trafficking investigation
Hundreds of women have come forward over many years with consistent accounts of abuse linked to a single British institution. Taken together, those accounts point not simply to isolated wrongdoing, but to a pattern many now recognise as trafficking and systemic exploitation. There is a national police investigation, but although the Metropolitan Police have now referenced trafficking – following pressure from campaigners – it is still not treating this as a trafficking investigation.
As Phil Brewer, former head of the Metropolitan Police’s anti-trafficking unit, said: “if you widen [the Met investigation] to trafficking, you are looking at that movement, you are looking at the evidence that has already been presented by some of the survivors that they were taken to have check-ups by medical examiners, so it would widen it to what happened prior to the offence or before the offence or even the actions that allowed the offence to take place. So straight away, you are widening it much more than you would if you just focused on specific incidents… I think the Met can do better.”
The distinction matters.
The scope of an investigation determines what evidence is sought, what questions are asked and, ultimately, what conclusions can be reached. If trafficking is not the frame, the evidence needed to establish it may never be gathered.
The police define the scope
At the same time, the government maintains that it cannot give a public statement in support of survivors in this case, so as not to prejudice an ongoing investigation. The effect is circular. The police define the scope; the government defers to it; and no one meaningfully tests whether that scope is sufficient. Meanwhile, survivors are told to wait – and to expect that this process may take years and probably not provide any justice.
This sits uneasily alongside Jess Phillips’s insistence that what matters is “deeds, not words”, because deeds are precisely what appear to be uneven. In one set of cases, there is urgency, coordination and visible political attention. In another, there is caution, delay and a narrowing of focus.
The difference invites a simple question: why is urgency applied in one case, but not another, strikingly similar case?
Part of the answer may lie in power. It was suggested by Jess Phillips that those connected to these events are wealthy and highly litigious and that this necessitates caution. That is a central feature here. The same wealth and influence that allowed abuse to continue unchecked now appears to be shaping the limits of accountability. If the state itself is constrained by that reality, then the system is not operating equally. It is adapting to those it is meant to hold to account.
What follows is a model of justice that is contingent on pressure. Progress does not happen automatically; it happens when survivors and campaigners force it. Doors do not open unless they are pushed. That is not how justice is meant to function. It should not depend on who can endure the longest or apply the greatest pressure. And yet, for many, that is exactly what it has become.
The system protects itself
There is a further concern. The full picture of what happened – who knew, who enabled, what was ignored – is unlikely to sit in one place. It is likely held across institutions, including Harrods entities, government departments, regulators and enforcement bodies. If investigations are too narrowly framed, that material may never be brought together. The system, in effect, protects itself through fragmentation as much as through inaction.
This is why No One Above has called for an independent assessment of the scope of the Metropolitan Police investigation. Not to interfere with it, but to ensure that it is adequate; that the right questions are being asked; and that evidence is not missed simply because the frame is too narrow. If the starting point is wrong, the outcome will be, too.
The implications go beyond a single case. Harrods is one of the most recognisable institutions in Britain. If systemic abuse can take place within such a setting, unexamined for so long, then it raises a wider question about how many other environments might operate under similar conditions. Without robust safeguards and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths, there is no reason to assume this is an isolated failure. It may be happening elsewhere. It may be happening now.
A repeated failure to hold powerful people to account
This points to a broader systemic issue: a failure, repeated over time, to hold powerful individuals to account during their lifetimes. Weak protections against legal intimidation, combined with a culture of caution when faced with influence, have created conditions in which impunity can persist. The result is a system that too often works around power, rather than against it.
So the question remains. If public inquiries do not deliver justice, if police investigations – as currently framed – risk missing the full scope of alleged wrongdoing and if government cannot or will not go further, then what will?
Because telling survivors that there may be no meaningful route to justice is not simply a failure of process. It is a failure of will and a clear failure of principle. At some point, that has to be confronted. The policies and systems that have repeatedly protected powerful men from scrutiny in Britain must now, through unflinching scrutiny of the Al-Fayed case, be dragged into the open. What this case exposes is not just a gap, but a pattern: the answer is no until enough pressure turns it into a yes. That is not justice, it is endurance.
Britain should be ashamed
Britain should be ashamed that it allowed this to happen. It should be more ashamed if it now tells survivors that there is no meaningful route to justice – because that is, in effect, a choice to leave the structures that enabled this intact and to accept the risk of repetition.
If the government is serious when it says it will not look away, then it cannot look away here.
If it believes in deeds, not words, then this is the moment for action.
And if the current system is not capable of delivering justice, then it is the government’s responsibility to change it.
Anything less leaves survivors with the same conclusion they have been forced to reach for too long: that justice, in practice, is not available to them. That is something no country should accept, least of all one that claims to uphold the rule of law.
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