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Labour MP Keith Vaz: "Losing 114 files for example is the loss of files on an industrial scale"
Files which may be linked to child abuse claims seem to have been lost "on an industrial scale" at the Home Office, the chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee has said.
The Home Office has said its own review last year found that 114 potentially relevant files could not be located.
Keith Vaz MP said it was "a huge surprise" that so much potential evidence had gone missing.
Lord Tebbit said he hoped any review would be conducted quickly.
Number 10 has rejected calls for an over-arching public inquiry into historical child abuse claims.
However, a new review, to be carried out by a senior legal figure from outside Whitehall, will look into the Home Office's handling last year of any claims made to it in the 1980s and 1990s of organised child sex abuse.
The Home Office's 2013 review found 527 potentially relevant files which it had kept, but a further 114 were missing, destroyed or "not found", according to the Home Office's most senior civil servant Mark Sedwill.
Among the files found, there were 13 pieces of information about alleged child abuse - nine of which were known or had been reported to the police, including four cases involving Home Office staff, he said in a letter to Mr Vaz.
The four other items, which had not been previously disclosed, "have now been" passed to police, he said.
Lord Tebbit, a former Tory minister and party chairman, said there may have been a political cover-up of abuse in the past.
He told the Andrew Marr programme: "At that time most people would have thought that the establishment, the system, was to be protected.
"And if a few things had gone wrong here and there that it was more important to protect the system than to delve too far into them.
"That view was wrong," he said.
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Lord Tebbit: "People thought that the establishment was to be protected"
Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, said there had been a "veil of secrecy over the establishment" for far too long.
Inquiry callsDeputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said he had an "open mind" about what other inquiries should take place, saying "whatever it takes" to uncover the truth and deliver justice should be done.
But Education Secretary Michael Gove said he did not support a public inquiry.
"The most important thing we need to do is make sure the work we do is proportionate and focused, and that we look at those allegations that cause real and genuine concern," he said.
Mr Vaz said the new review was "the right thing to do" and that he was "a little disappointed" that he had not been made aware of last year's review at the time.
'Sets of correspondence'The new review, announced this weekend, was set up after the prime minister asked Mr Sedwill to "find answers" to questions such as what happened to material reportedly supplied in a dossier by the late MP Geoffrey Dickens.
Former home secretary Leon Brittan says he received a "substantial bundle of papers" in the 1980s from Mr Dickens, reportedly containing abuse claims. Lord Brittan says he handed them on to officials - but their whereabouts are currently unknown.
Mr Sedwill said last year's Home Office investigation searched a central database for files concerning Mr Dickens, and organised child sex abuse more generally.
It "did not find a single dossier from Mr Dickens, but several sets of correspondence over a number of years to several home secretaries containing allegations of sexual offences", he said.
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Michael Gove: "No" to public enquiry on missing files
The report found no record of specific claims of abuse by prominent public figures, he said.
It also found the Home Office had passed to the appropriate authorities information received about child abuse which was "credible" and had "realistic potential for further investigation".
However, the new review will assess whether this investigation's conclusion is "still valid", Mr Sedwill said, "particularly in view of information now in the public domain since its completion last year".
Mr Dickens' son has said that his father claimed the information he was passing on would "blow the lid off" the lives of powerful and famous child abusers.
But former Tory minister David Mellor, who served under Lord Brittan as a home office minister in the 1980s, said there had been a "witch hunt" surrounding the handling of the missing information and that the former home secretary was being unfairly "pilloried".
He said the material was spoken of within the department at the time, but it was "not a very substantive thing at all".
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