The ISA Fails Before It Starts

The Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) was set up following the murders in 2002 of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells. It is supposed to offer an additional level of protection for children, and work in conjunction with the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB). From October 2009 for entire swathes of work involving contact with what the legislation refers to as ‘vulnerable people’ (not just children) it will run its Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS), which will require job applicants or existing job holders to be registered (at their own cost) with the ISA. The ISA in contrast has absolute power to force people onto its vetted and barred lists, as well as the ability to prosecute employers and employees for non-registered employment in areas the ISA considers under its remit. Terrifyingly, unlike the CRB though they’re allowed to use hearsay – they can play judge, jury and executioner towards people’s entire livelihoods on the basis of material which wouldn’t stand up in a court of law, with no meaningful comeback. Authors attending school assemblies will be presumed to be paedophiles if they refuse to register. Children’s parents will be presumed paedophiles if they refuse to register for summer exchange visits; the entire basis of the ISA is a universal presumption of paedophilia and an operating manual which subverts the rule of law.

One of the initial aims of Cosmodaddy.com is to bring about the abolition of the ISA.

This is not because any of the authors disagree with child protection – quite the opposite. We simply do not believe that the ISA by its very nature has a hope in hell of actually protecting children. Instead the bureaucracy will use an arcane ‘matrix’ to determine risk (whatever happened to assessing individual cases on their merits?), which will breach the human rights of vulnerable adults, will disincentivise social services and the police from old fashioned evidence collection and analysis, and instead make the detection of people who pose a real risk for children and other vulnerable groups that much harder. The ISA however accepts none of these points. Even when recently suffering an information security breach its response was to say:

“There has been one security incident in respect of information handling in the current year when an email containing confidential data was issued to the incorrect email address.

“A full investigation was carried out into this incident which concluded that there were no systematic failures in procedure and that the incident was due to human error. The incident did not result in any risk to safeguarding.”

A separate section on the “management and control of information risk” states: “While all staff are made continuously aware of information assurance issues, the lack of ISA policies to direct staff could have an impact on the confidentiality, integrity or availability of information. Policies are close to being finalised.”

Safeguarding is not a one-way process and in saying ‘risk to safeguarding’ it clearly doesn’t see those it considers caught in its remit (vetted or barred) as worthy of protection at all. I’m reminded of the government saying it sees the ISA as a ‘club’ to which ‘decent adults’ should want to be part of. Quite frankly considering the damage which it is already causing to the social fabric and the rule of law, should decency not really be determined by different criteria? We at Cosmodaddy.com will be campaigning in the months to come to convince ever more of you that an unaccountable bureaucracy which makes insidious presumptions, and which is guaranteed to make numerous errors (as the CRB has) is not the solution to child protection. There are existing services and procedures which are already responsible for child protection -  local public services must communicate between one another as they are required to but rarely effectively do, protection agencies need better funding and managing, and there needs to be a national conversation started that running society from databases, and ignoring local communities entirely, doesn’t protect anyone. Subscribe to this site, join us and tell us your stories if you’ve already been affected by the ISA.

Tags: child protection, Independent Safeguarding Authority, ISA, VBS, vetting, Vetting and Barring Scheme

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