1 Crown Office Row

Peter Skelton KC’s practice encompasses public inquiries, inquests, human rights litigation, clinical negligence, judicial review, national security and personal injury litigation, with a particular emphasis on multi-party actions and claims arising in foreign jurisdictions. He acts for both claimants and defendants.

Peter has been instructed in several major public inquiries over the last 20 years, most recently the Undercover Policing Inquiry (for the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police), the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (as counsel to the inquiry), the Leveson Inquiry (for the Mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime), the Al-Sweady Inquiry (for Iraqi judges), and the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry (for two national healthcare charities). He has previously represented bereaved families in the Bristol Royal Infirmary Inquiry and the Royal Liverpool Children’s Inquiry. From 2005 to 2009, he was counsel to the Rosemary Nelson Inquiry, which investigated allegations of state collusion in the solicitor’s murder.

In recent years, Peter has also acted for groups of victims and survivors of sexual abuse by David Fuller, Jimmy Savile and Max Clifford. He has also represented claimants in several other high-profile group actions, including Ian Paterson (breast surgery) and Rob Jones (gynaecological surgery). Previously, he acted for the claimants in the Winterbourne View Litigation the Cornwall Partnership Trust Litigation (institutional neglect and abuse), and the Nationwide Organ Group Litigation.

On the defendant side, Peter has acted for the Metropolitan Police in a group actions arising allegations of inappropriate sexual liaisons by undercover police officers, and in the claims brought by the families of the four victims of serial killer Stephen Port. He has also represented the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the Kenyan Emergency Group Litigation, which involved allegations of mistreatment by the Colonial Government of Kenya in the 1950s; and was instructed by an international mining corporation in a multi-party human rights claim arising from allegations of police brutality in Sierra Leone.

Call: 1997; KC: 2016; Middle Temple.

Contributing author to ‘Public Inquiries’ (published by OUP in 2011).

Basic French.

PNBA; PIBA.

Trent College, Nottingham; University of York (BA First class); University of Cambridge (MPhil).