Whither Labour on Civil Liberties?
Post-Blair/Brown Labour hasn’t yet started to define itself coherently, and there were initial fears that new Shadow Home Secretary Ed Balls would use his new (and unlikely) position to attack the ConDems from the right on civil liberties, but he’s hinting the opposite:
Mr Balls, in his first newspaper interview since being appointed shadow home secretary, admitted Labour’s policies under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which led to failed attempts to get Parliament to pass laws to permit suspects to be detained without charge for 90 and 42 days, had been a mistake.“Even 42 days was a step too far,” he said.“Our reputation as a party which protected liberty as well as security suffered as a result.“Our approach should always be that if the evidence shows we can go down from 28 days without impeding the police and security services from doing their jobs, then we ought to do it.”
“They are such exceptional measures that in an ideal world of course we would want to manage without them.”Labour would be prepared to consider alternative methods, such as a combination of covert surveillance and travel restrictions, he added.His comments come at a tricky time for Labour, with the party gripped by renewed in-fighting during the two-week paternity leave taken by party leader, Ed Miliband.Mr Balls said: “I’m quite clear we must always strike a balance between protecting our country from the risks of terrorist attacks on the one hand, and preserving our democratic freedoms and fundamental liberties on the other: it should never be a case of one or the other.”
Balls was also on The Andrew Marr Show this morning, where he fleshed out his position. He reaffirmed his support for a 14-day limit but warned that the coalition was “way too” liberal on CCTV and the DNA database.
Unlimited CRB Checks May Fall Away
‘Non-conviction’ information doesn’t clarify much, says Equalities Minister
The end of nanny state checking is imminent. Or is it?
Last week, Coalition Equalities Minister and Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone treated local constituents to an intriguing insight into her own and presumably Coalition thinking, on just how far the state should intrude into child-care arrangements.
Writing in her local paper, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, Ms Featherstone starts with a sobering tale of a young black boy picked up by the police for the appalling crime of playing hide-and-seek on the grounds of a local hospital. No action ensued. But, of course, the record of the fact that this boy had been picked up – the “soft information” – would remain on file pretty much forever, and the result of a brief and innocent youthful jape could blight his entire life.
Ms Featherstone is naturally not too happy with this. She writes: “The Home Secretary and I have commissioned an independent review of Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks. Obviously if someone is charged and convicted you would expect that information to remain on the police database – and it does. But in the area of ‘soft’ information (ie non-conviction information) at present this remains on the database too.
“And ‘soft’ information varies – anything from the above incident of playing Hide and Seek – to the sort of ‘soft’ information about Ian Huntley – the murderer in the Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman murder in Soham.”
She goes on to argue that it’s possible we over-reacted to the horrific events in Soham, coming up with a system where some nine million adults might have ended up on a national vetting and barring database. Time for some balance!
The government – as per the coalition agreement – is therefore now reviewing the Vetting and Barring scheme, with a view to scaling it back: the process of setting the terms of reference is under way.
Well, not quite.
An instant uber-frothy write-up of this story by the Mail on Sunday suggests that cutbacks in the CRB scheme are already a done deal, with parents no longer required to get checked before helping out in schools, and details of offences committed by new partners also far more limited than current schemes would make them.
The Home Office doesn’t quite see it like that. A spokesman there told us last night: “No review has yet been announced. Nothing is official.”
He then relented and admitted that even if nothing was yet official, the move was in the coalition agreement. It is the sort of thing that might be brought forward in this Autumn’s great repeal Bill – so we could do the math ourselves as to the likely timing for a consultation on that issue. The Minister might just have used the “wrong tense”.
It is to be hoped that the consultation will look beyond child protection, taking some time also to consider the legal and cultural consequences of New Labour’s machinations. Despite the Bichard Inquiry, it is highly unlikely that the Vetting and Barring scheme would have done much to stop Ian Huntley. His contact with his victims was secondhand, through a partner with a clean CRB record.
Meanwhile, an increasing reliance on “soft information” (aka hearsay) and its second cousin, behavioural scoring, has done much to legitimise the singling out of individuals who fail to conform. It has been given legal justification by the Pinnington case, in which judges ruled that even where police placed little reliance on “soft information” they held, they must still pass it on to a prospective employer.
A further green light for state surveillance was provided by the Court of Appeal last October, when three senior judges ruled that the police were perfectly entitled to carry on holding on to conviction data for as long as they wished – in fact, for up to 100 years – thereby driving a coach and horses through both data protection and legislation around the rehabilitation of offenders.
Two further thoughts that the Minister might care to insert into her consultation process.
The Independent Safeguarding Authority was hailed as a means to inject professionalism into the debate, but it owed as much to former Education Secretary Ruth Kelly’s embarrassment at finding her department too closely involved in the decision-making process, as it did to any real need for such a function. It was a prime example of ministerial buck-passing masquerading as statesmanlike wisdom.
What about the nine million who now won’t all need to be vetted? As El Reg has consistently argued, the end total, even under the reduced scheme announced by Ed Balls, was always going to be far greater, given the cultural drive towards “proving” one’s innocence. We reckoned between 14 and 16 million.
Without clear signals from government, that cultural imperative towards fearfulness, so assiduously fostered by New Labour, is still there, and is a key reason why so many employers not required by law to CRB-check their employees have started to do so. The recent case of a parent banned from a school sports day for not having a CRB check is just one instance of that culture.
At last, perhaps, the tide has started to turn – but it may yet need more than a little help from government to make sure it stays turned. ®
Tories Oppose Statutory Sex-Education
Remember the previous post about the pre-general election ‘wash up’? The Tories are now making mischief with sex education. From Ed Balls’ letter on his website to his shadow Michael Gove:
I am especially disappointed that, despite our conversation yesterday, you could not agree to make PSHE statutory in all state-funded schools. There is now widespread agreement that statutory PSHE is essential to prepare young people for adult life, and our reforms would ensure that by reducing the age of parental opt-out to 15, all children receive at least one year of compulsory sex and relationship education (SRE).
There is a large body of evidence showing that good SRE leads to young people taking greater responsibility and waiting longer to have their first sexual experience and thus reduced teenage pregnancy rates. It is because of this the provisions of the Bill had received such significant support in Parliament and more broadly across the sector, with faith groups and with parents.
As I explained yesterday, your insistence that parents should have a right to withdraw their children until they reach the age of 16 – the age at which they are in many respects considered adults – makes it impossible for us to proceed. Both British and European case law do not support an opt-out up to the age of 16. As I explained when we discussed yesterday, that amendment would have meant that the bill would not have been compliant with the ECHR. Your insistence that the age limit must be increased to 16 would have made the entire bill non-compliant with UK and European law and, therefore, our lawyers advised me that, as Secretary of State, I had no choice but to remove all the PSHE provisions.
This is a very significant set back, which will deny many young people proper and balanced sex and relationships education. I also strongly disagree with your insistence that children and young people attending academies should be excluded.
What a surprise. From the Shadow Home Secretary’s stumble over gay rights, we now move to the Shadow Children’s Secretary showing no interest whatsoever in empowering young people. And of course Balls (albeit hypocritically) shows they have no interest in human rights – they’re committed to repealing the Human Rights Act after all. The closer we get to May 6th the more the Tories start to reveal themselves as just as nasty as they were last time they were in power. Don’t be fooled for a moment about what these people are really like and for Heaven’s sake don’t vote for them.
The ISA: When a U-Turn Isn’t a U-Turn
Children’s Secretary Ed Balls has announced that he’s removing two million people from needing to be vetted by the Independent Safeguarding Authority’s (ISA) Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS):
Last night, a spokesman for Balls said he would accept all of [Sir Roger] Singleton’s recommendations in full. The law will be amended as soon as possible.
This will mean that someone working with children will have to undergo vetting only if he or she has contact with the same group at least once a week, rather than once a month as stated in the act. People, such as authors, who go into different schools or similar settings to work with groups of children, should not be required to register unless their contact with the same children is frequent or intensive.
Singleton will also recommend that 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds who help out in schools, sports organisations or elsewhere will not be required to register. Neither will overseas visitors who bring groups of children to the UK, unless they stay for more than three months.
Ministers will also make it clear that no parents making any form of private arrangements with each other’s children will be affected.
And unsurprisingly Balls and Singleton (who of course is the Head of the ISA) have spun and spun all week about how important the ISA is and how it would have saved Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, even though the cops who caught Ian Huntley acknowledge it wouldn’t have; even Vanessa George had been cleared by the CRB and there are no additional means by which the ISA would have picked her up. So why is this u-turn important? Because it isn’t a u-turn:
Although the revised rules have been announced as a reduction in the people who will need to be vetted, the registration list is set to increase each year – with more people being added than are likely to leave.
As such this child protection database, already the biggest of its kind, will cover even more of the population.
“We don’t have a prediction for how many will be on it,” said a Home Office spokesman.
The revised rules for England, Wales and Northern Ireland launched on Monday have been intended in part to reduce the number of people who will need to be vetted by the Independent Safeguarding Authority.
There had been plans for some 11.3 million adults to be vetted – but after criticism from school leaders and children’s authors the rules on frequency of contact have been eased, reducing this to an estimated nine million.
The whole ‘revision’ of the ISA is an exercise in spin by a government which is now desperate to convince a sceptical public and child protection practitioners that the agency is even necessary. And the ISA remains a solution to a problem which hasn’t been proven even to exist. Ian Huntley would never have worked at that school if the most basic pre-CRB check had been done, but people didn’t do their jobs properly. That’s why children like Baby Peter end up dead, not because of an absence of an unaccountable bureaucracy making presumptions of paedophilia of all of us. Huntley’s working at that school wasn’t the reason he got access to the girls – it was because of his girlfriend, who both the CRB and ISA wouldn’t have even noticed – it’s preposterous to think a bureaucracy could effectively police child safety. Tim Garton-Ash mocks the ISA pretty effectively:
I’m afraid that the government has not gone far enough in its efforts to protect our children. It is not sufficient for the newly established Independent Safeguarding Authority to vet every adult who comes into regular contact with children outside the home. As we know, most cases of child abuse occur within the extended family or at the hands of family friends. Therefore the state needs to get inside the home to ensure absolute security for every child.
Fortunately, building on the pioneering all-round security work done by the government of Tony Blair, and by the Metropolitan police under Ian Blair, we can now implement an excellent proposal made some years ago by the political analyst Eric Blair. Ahead of his time, he suggested that the state might install hidden round-the-clock monitoring cameras in every home to watch out for any signs of deviance and nip it in the bud. He called them telescreens.
Yet child protection experts point out that telescreens would not cover all situations in which abuse could occur. Therefore the Safeguarding Authority should really move to a system of in-brain chips for every adult who comes into contact with a child – including parents, all of whom are obviously a grave potential threat to their own children. Linked to the National Identity Register, the Criminal Records Bureau, the world’s largest DNA database, the ContactPoint database, the National Pupil database, the Police National Computer, the files of MI5 and MI6, and 17 other government databases, known and unknown, these constantly monitored in-brain chips would ensure that all British children could sleep safely in their beds, serene in the knowledge that the now consolidated Supreme Safeguarding Authority, headed by Lord Mandelson, was watching over them day and night.
The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.
Everyone Attacks the ISA!
The Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) is a direct attack on the social fabric of this country. It undermines the rule of law and presumes that a bureaucracy can find paedophiles and provide protection for the ‘vulnerable’, when even children’s charities agree it can’t. At last teachers are starting the fight back:
Teachers’ leaders representing almost 45,000 schools have written to the government to object to new child protection rules they say will stop language exchange programmes and deter parent-helpers.
In a letter to the children’s secretary, Ed Balls, seven associations spanning state and private schools warn that new requirements to vet anyone who works or applies to work with children on a voluntary or paid basis are “disproportionate” and will not stop some paedophiles.
The seven bodies say this will stop language exchanges altogether, because it will not be possible to vet overseas families who host British pupils. They argue that the rules will reduce the number of outside speakers prepared to come to give assemblies because they will have to go through the “excessive bureaucracy” of the vetting process. Parents who help out with drama productions, fundraising and school trips will also be affected.
Scouting jamborees, nativity plays, volunteering right across the spectrum will be affected by the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS). And with the government requiring a volunteering component for 18 year old school leavers (which sort of changes it from volunteering to ‘unpaid work’ doesn’t it?), every young person in further education will have to be vetted. Considering the ISA doesn’t require evidence-based disclosures in order to bar people from specific areas of work, there will be a huge risk of criminalising and tainting the futures of huge numbers of young people, and in the end deterring them from continuing with their education. The letter goes on to say:
schools were concerned the review would merely “tinker with the system because of the constraints of his [Sir Roger Singleton's] remit”.
“We are urging a review of the whole strategy,” the letter said.
The letter added that regulations failed to guarantee the safety of children.
“Concern has also been expressed by colleagues that there could be a sense of false security engendered by the completion of checks,” said the letter. “It is also worth reminding you that Ian Huntley might well not have been exposed by the CRB system.”
The letter was also signed by the Girls’ School Association, the Independent Association of Prep Schools, the Independent Schools Association and the Society of Heads of Independent Schools.
The teachers have got it right, but this is a government which believes fundamentally that databases and bureaucracies can solve every problem. Watch how Ed Balls won’t do anything to tackle any of these issues, whilst the ISA through its existence will discourage child protection practitioners from looking in the right direction for real abuse.
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
