Former prime minister Gordon Brown has said the forced migration of children to Australia and other Commonwealth countries during the 20th century is a bigger sex abuse scandal than the revelations about Jimmy Savile.
Giving evidence to the independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), Mr Brown, who issued a national apology to victims in 2010, said the mass transportation of 130,000 British children overseas amounted to "government-enforced trafficking".
He said: "This seems to me as probably the biggest national sex abuse scandal.
"Bigger than what people have alleged about Savile. Bigger than what people have alleged about individual children's homes. Bigger in scale, bigger in geographical spread,
and bigger in the length of time that went on undetected."I'm shocked about the information that I have seen."
Mr Brown told the inquiry that a Government minister should be "hauled" before it to explain why nothing has been done over "sickening" new evidence of abuse which has come to light in the past seven years.
He said: "We now know that the apology was only half the story, and we have yet to do something to remedy and to deal with the consequences of what is the other part of the story, which is as significant, perhaps more ... the abuse of so many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children."
He added that he had not been aware of the scale of the abuse when he delivered his national apology in 2010.
The Australian government apologised for its part in the scandal the previous day.
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