The ISA is Insidious and Unfair and Must Be Abolished

Tim Gill argues the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) into oblivion:

All the fundamental questions remain. Questions about cost. About due process. About data protection. About checks giving a false sense of security. About malicious accusations and people being wrongly identified as paedophiles. And, most profoundly, about the wider implications of living in a society in which casual, freely given offers of help are met not with appreciation but with deep suspicion.

Common sense tells us that the ideal of a zero-risk childhood is untenable, if not impossible. Of course, children have a just claim for a degree of protection from harm. But when it comes to protecting them, our responsibility should surely be to tackle the most serious threats first and foremost.

So as a parent, my response to the question “how would I feel if it were my child?” is as follows. We would all want to feel that our collective efforts to keep children reasonably safe in an uncertain world were well thought through, proportionate to the risk, and effective. On all these counts, the vetting system is still wholly unfit for purpose.

It’s not just unfit for purpose, it’s unsuitable for purpose. The ISA by definition won’t be able to fulfil its remit, all the while distracting its 250 administrators’ attention from the real abuses which are committed behind closed doors, almost always by people who don’t appear on its bureucratised radar. When we rationalise the management of risk we can’t exactly be surprised when, at enormous cost, children and other ‘vulnerable’ groups continue to be abused and killed, and a culture of suspicion continues to grow. When the most likely outcome is a generation of children and young people unable to risk assess the world for themselves, we should really think again. Bureaucracy and databases are pernicious and ineffective tools with which to manage society.

Home Office to Make £277m From ISA

Home Office minister Meg Hillier has revealed how much revenue will be raised by applications to the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA):

Home Office minister Meg Hillier said that the £277m of revenue expected in the scheme’s first three years is intended to cover the estimated costs of both the Vetting and Barring Scheme and the Criminal Records Bureau. She was responding to written parliamentary questions from James Brokenshire, her Conservative shadow counterpart.

The cost for each application will reflect the anticipated average cost of £64 for each application, she said. Some £28 of this will be the cost of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), which is responsible for running the scheme, and £36 for the services of the Criminal Records Bureau.

The fee is charged to people who apply for clearance to be allowed to work with organisations for children and vulnerable adults. Since 12 October last year people have been checked on a voluntary basis, but from June this year it will be compulsory.

Brokenshire also asked for an estimate of the number of people who are likely to be referred to the ISA because of fears that they pose a risk. The minister said that in the first year of operation this is estimated at 28,000.

So the biggest and most unnecessary bureaucracy in modern times has found a way to manage to pay for itself. What a shock. It’s fascinating that the only questions which are being asked of it in parliament are technical and budgetary. What about the immoral nature of the ISA? What about its surefire inability to detect genuine abuse of children and ‘vulnerable’ groups? What about the freedom the ISA has to bar people from specified work based on supposition and guesswork? What about the outrageous presumption the organisation makes, that everyone is a paedophile unless they can prove otherwise? What about the fact that no need has been demonstrated for this organisation even to exist? Alarm bells should be ringint that even now those aren’t the questions being asked by parliament.

The ISA must be abolished.

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.

Should Everyone Be on the DNA Database?

Matthew Zarb-Cousin thinks so:

As a member of the Labour Party, I would like to argue why I believe a DNA database, where swabs of DNA are taken at birth – and of people coming into the country – is not only fair but also vital.

“Do you want to live in a society where everyone is considered a potential criminal?”, asked Will Self on Question Time last Thursday. The reality, and I hate to break it to you, Will, is that everyone is a potential criminal.

Except not everyone is a potential criminal. This mentality is driving both the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), which is driven by the premise that everyone’s a paedophile unless they can prove they aren’t, and the ID cards project, which presumes everyone’s a terrorist unless they can prove otherwise. But how many paedophiles are there, and how many have used their work to pursue generally horrific aims? Ian Huntley didn’t, so should we all be presumed to be just like Vanessa George when we demonstrably aren’t? And where are all the ‘terrorists’? Could ID cards really prevent atrocities in the UK when they didn’t in Madrid? Zarb-Cousin says it’s ‘fair’ to take the DNA profiles of everyone in the country, rather than just those charged with a crime, but look at how the ISA is turning out in practice after only two months – this bureaucratic presumption of wrongdoing is damaging the social order – families aren’t engaging in school exchange visits, people are already volunteering less, scouting jamborees are being threatened, whilst children and other vulnerable people are not being ’safeguarded’. How is that fair, and that’s just the workplace – Zarb-Cousin advocates extending that level of suspicion to every single human being in the United Kingdom!

It’s a muddled argument, presupposing that the objection to the National DNA Database is about the database itself; it isn’t. Of course DNA and the national database have a vital role to play in crime detection, but you just need to look at the statistics to prove that holding the DNA profiles of innocent people has brought no benefits. I’m sure the Jacqui Smiths and Alan Johnsons of this world can find one or two cases where retaining profiles has led to one or two successes, but it takes a great deal of hubris to extend the logic of that out across the entire population. New Labour since its arrival has gradually eroded the rule of law, evidence-based policy making and the relationship between the individual and state. Give the state absolute power over our very genetic make-up, particularly a state quite as authoritarian as this one, and reap the whirlwind.

Supreme Court Attacks Independent Safeguarding Authority

The UK Supreme Court has spoken out against the Independent Safeguarding Authority’s (ISA) Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS):

“The widespread concern about the compulsory registration rules for all those having regular contact with children, as proposed by the Government in September 2009, demonstrates that there is a real risk that, unless child protection procedures are proportionate and contain adequate safeguards, they will not merely fall foul of the Convention [on human rights], but they will rebound to the disadvantage of the very group they are designed to shield, and will undermine public confidence in the laudable exercise of protecting the vulnerable,” wrote Lord Neuberger, one of the panel of five judges considering the case.

It’s interesting to see the UK’s supreme legal body agrees that the direction the ISA is going in won’t just end up disadvantaging the vulnerable groups it’s supposed to ’safeguard’, but that it will actually breach the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). I really hope Sir Roger Singleton, Ed Balls, anyone with influence over the ISA appreciates the significance of this, but I doubt it.

The ISA must be abolished. Only then can agencies and resources already tasked with protecting children and ‘vulnerable’ adults actually do their jobs properly. It’s reassuring to see that the Supreme Court understands this, but it’ll take more than this ruling to end the agency.

The ISA Grows in Scope Already

People have said there was no problem with the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) and its Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) because its scope was restricted; it wouldn’t apply to everyone, nor to all work, so there was nothing to fear. The scheme has been running for only a matter of weeks, but its head Sir Roger Singleton has already suggested it’ll grow in scope and will increase its power sooner rather than later:

far from reducing the scope of this scheme, Sir Roger suggested that the reach of the database could actually increase because companies, even those whose work did not normally involve contact with children, would see commercial advantage in asking employees to get an ISA check. “The electrical contractor who wants school business may decide that although he is not required to have all his electricians registered with the ISA, there is a tendering advantage to doing so,” said Sir Roger.

It had been thought that this scheme would be limited only to those who regularly come into contact with children as an essential part of their jobs, notably teachers, though they have long been subject to special checks. But the ISA registration will be needed by doctors, dentists, opticians and others whose clients might include children. If Sir Roger is right and businesses believe that it is important to be ISA registered, where will it stop?

The answer is, as with every bureaucracy – once it covers everything and everyone. A power grab like this is inevitable – no government bureacracy of this nature ever stays stable. It’s in their very nature to expand and the ISA will grow in scope, as it’s nebulous ‘protection’ remit allows ever more businesses, areas of the public sector and organisations to define ‘risk of harm to children or vulnerable adults’ as they see fit. And what about activity of a ’specified nature’ which involves children? Why not newsagents? Why not hairdressers? Any job could involve contact with children or vulnerable adults, so why shouldn’t the VBS encompass the entire British economy, presuming all the while that everyone might be a paedophile? Philip Johnston goes on to say:

Child protection has become a vast, self-perpetuating industry whose very existence depends upon maintaining the fiction that all adults are potentially harmful to children. Perversely, even though most abusers are known to the abused, and children are most at risk from relatives or their friends, the new ISA scheme excludes family or private arrangements. What sort of society is it where adults suspect other adults, and children are taught to suspect anyone other than their parents, who are often the people who cause them greatest harm?

I couldn’t agree more. The concept of the ISA is rotten to the core. Not only will it destroy social cohesion and the rule of law, but it won’t have a hope of actually protecting those caught under its remit. The VBS is a sop to the child protection industry, which in its zeal for total protection and the removal of risk from daily life, has failed to grasp where its attention needs to be focused. It’ll mean that the people guilty of genuine abuse will become ever more invisible to the authorities, as they search in vain only for people who are known to the criminal justice system, and worse in the case of the ISA for people against whom the vaguest, most unprovable of allegations have been made. Johnston is right:

An obsession with health and safety, an unwillingness to accept that there is an element of risk in everything we do and a requirement for virtually everyone dealing with children to be subjected to a criminal record check have turned volunteering into something unwarrantedly expensive, bureaucratic and intrusive. And to what end? As Sir Roger admitted, cases of abuse will never be eliminated. “Every now and then something inexplicable happens that will defy our best attempts to understand and explain it.”

The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.

ISA’s Futile Barring Scheme Begins

Publicservice.co.uk reports that today marked Day 1 of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA)’s Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS):

Home Office Minister David Hanson said: “Today marks a major step forward in the protection of the most vulnerable members of our society. The new scheme means greater assurance that anyone who regularly works or volunteers with children or vulnerable adults will be appropriate to do so. We believe this is a common sense approach, and what the public would rightly expect.”

The deputy children’s commissioner, Sue Berelowitz, played down criticism of the scheme and said it was not “over-bureaucratic” and did not limit opportunities for volunteers to work with children.

Whilst the scheme has now come into force, the vetting does not become mandatory until next year. People looking to work or volunteer with vulnerable groups must become registered with ISA by November 2010. Existing workers must start to become registered by April 2011.

Sue Berelowitz is clearly living on another planet. The VBS isn’t over-bureaucratic? Really? So determining risk for children or other ‘vulnerable adults’ through a graph matrix applied to each individual vetted by the scheme isn’t bureaucratic. So not allowing employers to use their own discretion, but imposing huge fines on them and the barred employee, should either or both parties choose to ignore or disagree with the ISA, isn’t bureaucratic. So the fact that the ISA is entitled to use evidence which would never be allowed in a court of law to make barring decisions isn’t bureaucratic? And what about the scheme itself? Well it covers:

- regulated activity, which it defines as paid or voluntary work which involves contact with children or vulnerable adults;

- controlled activity, which it defines as support work that is ‘frequent or intensive’ in the NHS, the health sector in general, further education, adult social care, and work in specified organisations with frequent access to sensitive records about children and vulnerable adults.

Oh and a barred person can work in a controlled activity as long as ’safeguards’ are put in place. None of this is clearly overly bureaucratic.The thing is none of it is necessary at all.

Employers have risk assessment and safeguarding policies, local agencies like the police, social services and the probation services are all already required to talk to one another about people they feel pose risks to vulnerable groups (and to act accordingly), and we already have the CRB (which is admittedly merely a snapshot of someone’s criminal justice history). The only additional ’safeguarding’ the ISA provides is determined by an administrator far removed from the person they’re vetting, who can use entirely unfair, meaningless and irrelevant criteria (such as heresay or even their own prejudices about their sex lives) to determine someone’s suitability for ‘regulated’ or ‘controlled’ activity. Does that make sense to you? It doesn’t to me.

And remember this is all to keep the most vulnerable members of society safe from the legions of paedophile hordes, which it presumes we all are, unless we spend £64 to prove otherwise. Noone debates there are abusers out there, nor that there are paedophiles who will stop at nothing to get to children and young people. But as Esther Rantzen recently pointed out, the vast majority of child abuse happens at the hand of ‘people very close to them’. The ISA was created in response to the murders committed by Ian Huntley in Soham in 2002, but he’d never have had a chance if his employer had carried out the pre-CRB-era checks on his background. It also wasn’t his employment at the school he worked at which led to the murders – it was a chance encounter. The ISA is a bureaucratic nightmare which has already cost nearly £200 million; it subverts the rule of law, and is entirely unnecessary.

The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.

Now Scouting is Threatened by ISA

The Scouting Association has announced that major gatherings from around the world may be cancelled because of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA):

It has warned that major gatherings of packs from around the world may be cancelled due to the introduction of the scheme.

Under the controversial rules anyone working or volunteering with children must register for background checks.

But organising checks on thousands of foreign Scout leaders was “just not possible”, a spokesman said.

Volunteers who fail to register face the prospect of criminal prosecution and a fine of up to £5,000.

Simon Carter, Scout Association spokesman, said: “When we hold big international jamborees we rely on adults from other parts of the world coming in and staffing these events.

“The rules for checking people out suggest that if they were to come along and do intensive activity they would have to be checked.

“Clearly we cannot do that, it’s just not possible.”

So now the ISA is disadvantaging young people. Brilliant. The ISA by its very nature could never provide any meaningful protection for young people at scouting jamborees – how could it after all? A bureaucracy which relies on determining risk by a graph matrix, with the information it uses legally allowed to come from hearsay would never be able to detect those likeliest to commit abuse, nor to succeed in barring them from from attending.

It’s shocking to hear the Department for Children, Schools and Families imply it’s going to find a way around the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) for the Scouting Association, given that doing so would leave the entire purpose of the ISA dead and buried.

The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.

The ISA Breaches Offenders’ Human Rights

When I say the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) contravenes the rule of law, this is what I mean. The Human Rights Act 1998, which brings the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into British law clearly states:

Article 7 No punishment without law

1 No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or international law at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the criminal offence was committed.

And yet that’s exactly what the ISA is all about – the ISA is set up to be a judge, jury and executioner for everyone’s employment rights. By its own admission it operates to a lower standard of proof than a criminal court for its Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS):

Some applicants will be given eight weeks in which to make “representations” against the move to bar them, but those with serious convictions against their names will have no opportunity to do so.

However even those who are allowed to tell their side of the story may struggle to clear their names, as ISA guidance states clearly that it operates to a lower standard of proof than a criminal court.

“Assessing whether something happened on the ‘balance of probabilities’ means, simply, whether it is ‘more likely than not’ that something happened,” the document says.

If an individual’s representations fail and they are barred, they will be unable to work with children or vulnerable adults and face prosecution if they seek jobs in these fields.

They then have three months in which to launch an independent appeal to a body called the Upper Chamber, which will comprise a judge and two “non-legal members”.

However the applicant cannot simply appeal against the decision to bar them, or the subjective opinion of the risk they pose made by the ISA.

Guidance states: “You can only seek permission to appeal against the decision of the ISA on the ground that it made a mistake no any point of law, or in any finding of any fact which it has made and on which the decision was based.”

This could be that it interpreted a law wrongly; made an error in its own procedure; or had no evidence to support its ruling.

The guidance adds that “the decision whether or not it is appropriate for an individual to be included in a barred list is not a question of law or fact”.

If this appeal fails, individuals may try to take their legal fight to the Court of Appeal.

But they may have to wait for as long as a decade before they are allowed another chance to challenge the ISA’s ruling – with older applicants facing a longer wait than younger ones.

The guidance states: “A decision to include a person on a list means that they will be barred from the entirety of the workforce affected for a minimum period of one, five or ten years depending on the individual’s age.”

Under-18s will be barred for a year before their cases can be reviewed; 18- to 25 year-olds will have five-year bans and anyone over 25 must wait 10 years. They must prove they no longer pose a danger before they are cleared to work with children [or vulnerable adults - Ed]

In other words even if the justice system hasn’t determined that certain offenders (and this government has created an unprecedented number of those) should be denied the freedom to work with children and/or ‘vulnerable adults’, the ISA, without even using evidence which would be admissible in a court of law, can. It’s a flat-out contravention of the Human Rights Act, with a torturous (and threadbare) right of appeal, and for what benefit? The ISA wouldn’t have detected Vanessa George – how could it? For that matter when its entire operation is based on determining ‘risk’ by means of a graph matrix how will it ever catch people who genuinely pose a risk to vulnerable groups?

The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.

The ISA Will Always Fail

What Vanessa George, Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen did to those children is so heinous I can barely grasp it:

Nursery worker Vanessa George and her accomplices Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen face lengthy jail terms after admitting a string of sex offences yesterday.

The three – who had started a bizarre relationship online – met for the first time in the dock at Bristol crown court, where they pleaded guilty to abusing young children and sharing the images of that abuse with each other.

It also emerged there had been online discussion between the three about abducting a child. Officers believe this may have been nothing more than a fantasy but expressed relief that finding and catching them had halted any nascent plots.

A serious case review has been launched to look at how George, previously considered a stalwart of her community in Devon, was able to abuse children. There have been calls for the use of camera phones in nurseries to be looked at again and for more checks to make sure workers do not get such easy and private one-to-one access with children.

(via ScoobsChris)

This isn’t a post about how unusual child abuse conducted by women is. I want it to be abundantly clear that Vanessa George passed her Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check and she almost certainly would have passed the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA)’s Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS). This whole case makes a mockery of the Home Office’s strategy of child protection – expecting a database or a bureaucracy to detect an abuser who doesn’t have a criminal record, and who has probably become skilful at concealing their behaviour is lunacy. Instead these three were able to commit their horrific crimes against children because:

“The nursery was not run properly. The problem was there were about 10 staff and they are all good friends – so standards got really slack.”

Parents knew standards were slack, the nursery was run poorly and then there’s Ofsted, which said after George’s arrest:

“Ofsted was unaware of the recent allegations about a member of staff at Little Ted’s Nursery in Plymouth which we understand has led to its immediate closure.

“We have had one recent complaint relating to the nursery. This complaint was not of a level that would require police involvement and did not relate to the content of the allegations made public today.

“Ofsted is investigating this matter in line with our normal procedures and it would not be appropriate to comment further until the outcomes of that investigation are complete.”

Could children’s services or the Local Safeguarding Children’s Board have stopped this? Maybe not, but it’s an indication of just how many services are out there tasked with safeguarding children, who actually have involvement with children, and even they weren’t able to detect this abuse until it was too late. Expect the ISA, with its starting presumption that everyone’s a paedophile, to do any better will end in disaster for the genuinely vulnerable.

Private Childcare Help? Illegal!

Ofsted, whose remit is “to inspect and regulate care for children and young people, and inspect education and training for learners of all ages”, has deemed that parents who look after their friends’ children and receive a ‘reward’ must register with them as childminders:

It said most parents would be exempted but those who babysit for more than two hours at a time, or more than 14 days per year, should be registered.

The “reward” could be money or free baby-sitting in return, it said.

It comes after Ofsted told two police women to end an arrangement to care for each other’s children.

They didn’t stop there:

Two women who work part-time for the same company have been told that they cannot care for each other’s child unless they register as childminders and undergo Ofsted inspections.

The women, who wish to remain anonymous, gave birth to girls at similar times. They set up a job share, with both working half a week in the same post. They are also close friends, so when one was at work the other cared for both children.

Ofsted, however, has put an end to the arrangement. It said that, according to legislation, caring for another person’s child “for reward” was classed as childminding.

And in a stroke Ofsted has expanded the scope of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). This after the chief of the ISA, Sir Roger Singleton had previously said:

that because the scheme only applied to arrangements made through third parties such as a school or a club, the personal arrangements made by parents with friends were not included: “This means that the scheme will not come into play when parents agree to give their friends’ children a lift to school or to cubs. Nor will it cover instances where parents work with children at school or a youth club on an occasional or one-off basis, or when parents visit their child’s school, for example, to watch the Christmas play.”

This should concern everyone. It’s not even a power grab, but a demonstration of the way in which agencies such as the ISA work – it’s at the heart of the argument against ID cards. The government starts by saying it’s starting a new quango, or introducing a new system of ‘protection’, and that they’ll add ’safeguards’ and ‘commissioners’ to protect against abuses of the system. But the truth is what you see here – other quangos and other government agencies then step in and cause their scope to expand massively beyond that which was initially, formally announced. These women will now have to register with the ISA at a cost of £64 each, to prove that they aren’t paedophiles, even though each of them already knows that about the other. Kim Simpson, a campaigner for the Open Eye Group said:

“Something akin to a kind of anxiety-driven psychosis seems to have engulfed government policymaking in the realms of children and family life.”

Vernon Coaker, the Children’s Minister, responded saying:

“We need to be sure that the legislation does not penalise hard-working families. My department is discussing with Ofsted the interpretation of the word ‘reward’.”

Will the ISA Bar Sam Handley?

Newsflash: a PE teacher had a life before he was a teacher, and did some nude modelling. Now because those photos have surfaced on a porn site, he faces the sack:

A teacher at an all-boys grammar school has been suspended after naked pictures of him surfaced on a gay porn website.

Internet links to images of Sam Handley, 25, were spread around Harvey Grammar School in Folkestone, Kent.

Using the pseudonym ‘Mike’, the PE teacher posed naked in one picture sprawled on a bed with his legs apart, and in another he is captured resting against some furniture.

Does it appear he did this shoot whilst a teacher? No. In fact someone in the HateMail’s comments claims to be a former student who knows that for sure, and stands by him as a good teacher. Why was he suspended? Why is he at risk of dismissal? The same person rightly points out that they weren’t even accidentally accessed by pupils – someone had to trawl whichever porn site was hosting them at the time and then choose to circulate them. Should Handley be held responsible for that? The Sun reports:

He was hauled in by the deputy head and sent home.

Last night he was facing the sack – as pupils at prestigious Harvey Grammar School, in Folkestone, Kent, told how a gleeful classmate stumbled on the pictures.

A ‘gleeful classmate’ eh? In that case I hope that this pupil will be held entirely responsible for malicious behaviour against a man who is allowed to have a life in the internet age (and who has harmed noone), and duly be expelled. It’s absurd that Handley might lose his job, and might be barred anyway by the Independent Safeguarding Authority from working with children (because they’re allowed to make barring decisions based on material such as this) – take a look at the photos on the Sun hyperlink to see just how harmless they are. Then ask yourself what sort of people we will end up with as teachers (not to mention how few of them) if we continue down the path of expecting them to have had flawless lives before their careers started. Sam Handley’s photos may be embarrassing, but they’re not harmful, and his continued employment should only be determined by his merits as a teacher.

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

Independent Safeguarding Authority Head Patronises His Opponents

Sir Roger Singleton, the government-appointed head of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) has decided that rather than giving a reason why the ISA should exist, he’d rather just patronise the scheme’s opponents:

Sir Roger, whose agency will run the vetting scheme, said: “We need to calm down and consider carefully and rationally what this scheme is and is not about.

“It is not about interfering with the sensible arrangements which parents make with each other to take their children to schools and clubs.

“It is not about subjecting a quarter of the population to intensive scrutiny of their personal lives and it is not about creating mistrust between adults and children or discouraging volunteering.”

He added: “It is about ensuring that those people who have already been dismissed by their employers for inappropriate behaviour with children do not simply up sticks and move elsewhere in the country to continue their abuse.

“And it is about bringing an end to the need for repeated CRB checks which so many people have found irritating. ISA registration is a one-off process for a single fee.”

Except he’s wrong on all counts, and for the record Sir Roger I am calm, I have considered your scheme carefully and rationally and know exactly what it’s about. It’s about presuming that everyone in the country is a paedophile unless they can prove (at their cost) otherwise. It’s about discouraging children from risk-assessing on their own, and teaching them to believe that a giant, unmanageable bureaucracy can protect them from harm. It’s about undermining the rule of law, using heresay, supposition, guesswork and a graph matrix to quantify ‘unsuitability’ by people who are themselves unaccountable for their decisions. The ISA makes all the wrong presumptions about relationships in society, breaks down trust and quite simply isn’t necessary. Oh and it doesn’t supplant the CRB…

There are people who would have you believe that the ISA or even CRB would have prevented Ian Huntley’s Soham murders, but it’s already been determined that even the most basic (and pre-CRB) checks would have stopped him in his tracks; they were never done. As Esther Rantzen rightly said, the vast majority of abuse is committed by people whom the victim already knows – the ISA is yet another scheme aimed at giving the illusion that the government is doing something, when the people already tasked with protection aren’t (for a variety of reasons). All risk can never be eliminated and certainly won’t be by a bureaucracy.

The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished (calmly and rationally).