Since Margaret Hodge's appointment last month as minister for children and young people, there have been calls for her resignation over her handling of child abuse allegations while she was leader of Islington council between 1982 and 1992.

These have been led by former Islington social workers, who claim their concerns at the time about the safety of children were not listened to, and by the National Association for People Abused In Childhood, which claims that her "inappropriate" appointment sends out a message that child abuse is not being taken as seriously by the government as it should be. But professional bodies and children's charities have remained silent on the issue.

Interviews by Lauren Revans.

Margaret Hodge:

"In 1990, when I was leader of Islington council, Liz Davies's boss, David Cofie, came to see me and said he thought a paedophile was operating out of a house. I was beside myself with worry. I took it to people who were senior to Cofie and the area child protection committee immediately got involved.

The house was put under surveillance for quite a long time. They interviewed every child who went into that home. It was an extremely thorough exercise.

But at the end of that process, they came back to me and said that there was no evidence to substantiate the claim. Cofie didn't believe it and wanted to take the children into care. It was a simple disagreement. We could equally have taken 14 children into care wrongly.

After that, I am not conscious of them coming back to me with any further concerns. Indeed, I'm not conscious of ever having met Liz Davies. I was only told about a single house, not a network of abuse. I made certain the investigation into that house happened, and would have done the same with later allegations. I certainly never stopped an allegation of abuse being investigated.

The only mistake I made was believing the relevant officers who were sent away to investigate allegations made by the 'Evening Standard' in late 1992 who came back to me saying they were all unfounded. But, when you think you have thoroughly looked at questions and you have got the advice of respected senior social workers against the story of a newspaper that won't even share its information, who would you believe? That was my mistake. And I have lived with that.

In terms of their requests for extra youth workers, these were unrealistic at a time of huge government funding cuts and when we had already increased both the number of social workers and their salaries. So I told them they would have to re-allocate existing resources.

I can't think of anybody who is working in an area that covers social services who has not experienced mistakes being made and has not been scarred in the process. Our understanding 13 years ago of what was happening in children's homes was also much, much less than today. That was really early days.

But things like my very bruising Islington experience helped change people's experiences. Even as a backbencher, I was responsible for getting legislation in place for ensuring that supply teachers were checked before they were employed in schools.

Since then, during my time in government, I have had three years as minister for early years. It's a period of work I am very proud of.

In that time, I managed to put a framework in place that's enabled us to introduce nursery education for all four-year-olds and nearly all three-year-olds, a new integrated inspection regime under Ofsted, and a "climbing frame" of qualifications for people working with children so they can work their way through modules and end up being fully qualified social workers or teachers.

In addition, the bringing together of early years services with social care which I started in Islington has formed the basis of what we are now doing nationally under Sure Start. I think that's one of the most successful initiatives of the Labour government, and I had a pretty important part in developing it.

That experience underlines my suitability for the job of minister for children and young people, within this radical re-organisation where we are bringing together all the services that affect children's lives, with the child at the centre of everything we do. I did it in Islington. I did it in central government. And now I'm taking that a step forward. "

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Liz Davies:

"In 1990, when I was a senior social worker employed by Islington council, my colleagues and I identified patterns indicative of sexual abuse among a number of vulnerable local young people.

Housing and environmental officers working in the same neighbourhood office as us had also noticed children sleeping on the floor of adults' homes and children being taken out in vans at night.

We talked to colleagues in the police and in education and decided to take the issue to our neighbourhood forum. We thought we might be able to organise a network of protective adults within the community. We also asked for a re-allocation of youth workers from the central allocation to do three months' outreach work with these young people.

At that time, Margaret Hodge was leader of Islington council and was also our local councillor and part of our forum. She asked for senior officer reports of our concerns, which we provided. She then told us via the director of social services that it would be inappropriate at a time of budget cuts to allocate extra resources to our area.

The following month, we were told by the assistant director of social services and the local police chief that there was no evidence to support our continuing concerns. We were ordered to stop all interviewing of children and all child protection conferences in relation to this issue.

We agreed with local police officers to continue collecting information against our orders, and slowly discovered that people within our own department were involved. That was very chilling. We thought we had been protecting these children, but by putting them in care we had actually been putting them in danger.

In October 1991, all the agencies involved called for the area child protection committee to set up a working party. But the working party decided there was no evidence of networks of abuse, despite the fact there had already been at least one arrest by then.

It wasn't long after this that I left Islington social services department. Between April 1990 and February 1992 I had written 15 reports and compiled a card index of 61 children. By that time, we didn't trust a single residential home. Residential workers had started to tell us about child abusers coming in to some homes at night. Children were being taken from children's homes at the weekend to places all over the country. Some foster carers were also thought to be involved.

Despite the various inquiries into the abuse allegations that took place, there was never a multi-agency working group investigating organised abuse. Although it is fair to say that such investigations have come a long way since then, they were not unknown at the time.

The new minister for children is a very important post. We all want to get it right. There were many young people abused by the Islington regime and I am worried about the message that Hodge holding that post sends to young people. As councillor for that ward she would have received monthly reports on the issue, but a full investigation never happened.

The most important thing is that she didn't listen to very experienced professional staff employed by her council to protect children. Because of that, she didn't listen to the children we were representing.

I want someone with authenticity and integrity in relation to working with children to hold this new post, someone who will always put the interests of children first, over and above political issues and budgetary issues. I cannot say that Hodge would do that.

Perhaps the prime minister didn't expect such a strong reaction after all this time. He probably thought it was long enough ago. But in terms of suffering abuse and suffering being a whistle-blower, it feels like only yesterday. "