Home Secretary Theresa May is to address Parliament on the row over her department's handling of sex abuse claims dating back to the 1980s.
The Home Office faces accusations it failed to act on evidence of child abuse allegations by public figures.
Mrs May's statement comes after it emerged that her department has lost 114 potentially relevant files.
Former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Tebbit has said there "may well have been" a political cover-up.
The government has rejected calls for an over-arching public inquiry into the various allegations of child abuse from that era.
However a new review, to be carried out by a senior legal figure from outside Whitehall, will look into a Home Office review last year of any information it received in the 1980s and 1990s about organised child sex abuse.
'Industrial scale'The review, announced on Saturday, was set up after the prime minister asked the Home Office's top civil servant Mark 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 said he received a "substantial bundle of papers" in the 1980s from Mr Dickens, reportedly containing abuse claims.
Lord Brittan said he handed them on to officials - but their whereabouts are currently unknown.
Lord Tebbit, who served in various ministerial roles under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, said at the time people had an "almost unconscious" tendency to protect "the system".
"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," he said. "That view was wrong."
Last year's Home Office review found 527 potentially relevant files which it had kept, but a further 114 were missing, destroyed or "not found".
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End Quote Labour MP Simon DanczukThe potential here is for the Home Office to have lost files that could have stopped abusers from carrying on abusing children"
Mr Vaz, chair of the Home Affairs Committee, said this represented loss of files "on an industrial scale" and it was "a huge surprise" that so much potential evidence had gone missing.
Among the files found, there were 13 pieces of information about alleged child abuse - nine of which were already known or had been reported to the police, including four cases involving Home Office staff, Mr Sedwill said in a letter to Mr Vaz.
The four other items, which had not been previously disclosed, "have now been" passed to police, Mr Sedwill said - although a Home Office spokeswoman said "now" meant during the 2013 review, as opposed to at the time the allegations were received.
'Flabbergasting'The Metropolitan Police declined to comment on the Home Office files specifically, but said it was "assessing information" as part of Operation Fairbank - which was set up in 2012 after Labour MP Tom Watson made claims about a "powerful paedophile ring" linked to a previous prime minister's "senior adviser" and Parliament.
Mr Watson has set up an online petition calling on the prime minister to "make amends for historic failures" by establishing a national inquiry, which has now been signed by more than 55,000 people.
Labour MP, Simon Danczuk, who has campaigned for claims of abuse at Westminster to be investigated, has described the situation as "flabbergasting".
He told the BBC: "We know from child abusers that if they aren't stopped in their tracks, then they will carry on abusing.
"So the potential here is for the Home Office to have lost files that could have stopped abusers from carrying on abusing children.
"I can't think of anything more devastating than that. The public will believe that they've been lost deliberately in an attempt to hide the names of the people named in the files - and you can't blame the public for reaching that conclusion."
May to address MPs on sex abuse claims
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