An Open Letter to Children’s Secretary Ed Balls
Dear Mr Balls,
The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.
I as much as any other reasonable person accept the need to protect children and other vulnerable groups in society, but the ISA isn’t the way to go about it. In your letter to Barry Sheerman MP, Chair of the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee, you say:
Our aim throughout has been to develop an approach which is proportionate, balanced and effective, with the scheme operating in a way which is neither burdensome nor bureaucratic, or off-putting to potential volunteers in children’s settings – while still meeting the concerns of parents.
I’m terribly sorry but if those were your aims you have a very funny way of attaining them. The ISA in practice is already neither proportionate, nor balanced, nor effective. It is indeed bureaucratic, is already off-putting to potential volunteers and couldn’t possibly meet the concerns of parents. After all, how could it? For risk credibly to be determined, it needs to be assessed on evidence which is fair and, as you say, balanced. The ISA doesn’t do that:
The risk assessment model starts by identifying a series of possible ‘hazards’, which may come about as a result of a person taking a job/volunteering position, and listing them in a table. It gives the examples of ‘inappropriate physical contact with a 12- to 16-year-old pupil during a lesson’, ‘building a relationship which is exploited out of school resulting in underage sex’, and ‘taking photos of 12- to 16-year-old pupils (eg, during swimming lessons)’. Once they have identified the hazards, the case worker will give each a figure from one to five for the impact it would have on a child (in the examples above, it gives these hazards the figures of four, five and two). Then, they will give it a figure between one and five for the likelihood that the event will occur.
Once they have these two figures for each hazard, they will transfer the figures to ‘a matrix’, which seems to involve basically plotting them on a graph. So for each individual they are considering barring, they will end up with a graph with a series of dots on it: ‘The risk matrix gives a picture of the risk assigned to each hazard as a result of the likelihood and impact assessments.’ Then – somehow, it doesn’t exactly specify how – the ISA is supposed to be able to tell from this graph whether the person is a risk or not, and whether they should be barred.
Clearly a system like this, with caseworkers who don’t even know the people they are vetting through any personal involvement, who are free to take heresay, supposition, prejudices and evidence which wouldn’t be admissible in a court into account, is damaging to the rule of law. It also suggests to children that they can only have safe relationships with adults if those adults are vetted by the government first, and discourages the vast majority of adults (almost all of whom are safe to work with children) from contact which in times gone by would have been considered normal. The ISA is poisoning the social fabric.
To set up a vetting scheme which doesn’t allow employers any individual leeway to risk assess their employees and potential employees is to miss the point of where abuse against children and other vulnerable groups actually takes place. Numerous child care experts in recent weeks have acknowledged that almost all abuse against children is perpetrated by someone close to the family. Esther Rantzen herself said:
“Most abused children suffer at home, at the hands of people very close to them; the risk provided by strangers is minimal.”
The founder of Childline says that the ISA is damaging to the national psyche and thus contributes to putting children at risk. It’s an understandable outcome when you have an all-pervasive scheme such as this, run as a bureaucracy with the outgoing presumption that everyone is a paedophile/abuser unless they can prove otherwise (at their own cost). This isn’t a question of ‘striking the right balance’ or ‘drawing the line’ somewhere else in vetting and barring people from work, it is about a bureaucracy which is immensely damaging, which will make it harder to detect genuine abusers, and make it much harder to teach our young people to risk assess for themselves. A review isn’t needed here – the ISA must go and go now.
I would welcome your thoughts on the points I have raised, but there is no room for compromise about whether the ISA should continue. If you want to protect children and vulnerable adults you should:
- let existing professionals in HR, the police and social services do the jobs they know how to do. It’s insulting to them to suggest that a barely accountable bureaucrat only (for the most part) observing the world of work is able to protect the vulnerable more effectively than them;
- reform the management of local police services (particularly the Metropolitan Police) and courts, whose record keeping is incompetent at best, outright dangerous at worst;
- get the inter-agency communication which is supposed to protect children and vulnerable adults to actually happen uniformally. Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez would never have been murdered in New Cross if that had taken place as it should have.
Finally you and your cabinet colleagues need to accept that risk cannot be eliminated in society, in protecting us from terrorism, from identity theft, or from the abusers in our midst. Even the (then) senior detective who set up the surveillance operation which led to Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr’s arrest acknowledges Huntley didn’t kill through his job working at a school. The ISA’s remit ignores that fundamental point; it’s ludicrous then to suggest that a £170 million bureaucracy, which even you admit has barely any need, could ever succeed at stopping people like him, certainly without enormous collateral damage. I’m shocked at your apparent willingness to write off the people already being damaged by the ISA; to suggest the ISA is like a seatbelt is an insult to those being strangled by it.
Yours sincerely,
Cosmodaddy
