Home Secretary Theresa May has announced that [ISA] registration, due to begin next month, has been put on hold.

There will be a review of the entire vetting and barring scheme, with a scaling back to “common-sense levels”.

The government says the vetting scheme would have been “disproportionate and overly burdensome”.

Mrs May told the BBC that the measures were “draconian”.

“You were assumed to be guilty until you were proven innocent, and told you were able to work with children,” she said.

“All sorts of groups out there were deeply concerned about this and how it was going to affect them.

“There were schools where they were very concerned that foreign exchanges could be finished as a result of this, parents were worried about looking after other people’s children after school.”

The government is now contacting 66,000 organisations, including charities, voluntary groups and education authorities, to tell them that the planned registration is being cancelled.

Excellent news, really quite an impressive step in the right direction, particularly by a Conservative Party which in the past has been so succeptible to moral panics. In fact it’s highly impressive that May has used the term ‘draconian’ to describe the scheme, but it remains to be seen what this ‘scaling-back’ will involve. The ISA has already caused significant damage to the social fabric, presuming as it does that everyone is a paedophile unless they can prove otherwise. The Vetting and Barring Scheme was one of the most serious blights on the rule of law under New Labour, allowing the ISA to decide on people’s suitability as ‘safe’ to work with ‘vulnerable’ people (which would inevitably widen in its scope and definition over time) based on heresay and personal prejudice, with the most threadbare of rights of appeal.

The ISA, left unchecked, will send the message to younger people that everyone older than them is a potential threat, will make it more difficult for younger people to learn how to risk assess meaningfully for themselves, and will allow government to make decisions which are best suited to local people and local communities. After all the Soham murders, which the ISA was set up in response to, weren’t caused by an absence of child protection at the school which Ian Huntley worked at. And Huntley would never have worked at that school if existing protection provisions had been properly adhered to, and only gained contact with Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells because of their association with his girlfriend. The ISA could never have prevented that, indeed such a bureaucracy will never adequately be able to detect child abuse, which is invariably perpetrated by someone children already know (and who won’t be on a database). Is there a problem with paedophilia and child abuse? Of course, but it’s not best tackled through over-reliance on a database, nor by subverting the rule of law. We can only hope that the coalition really has understood that it can’t prevent risk, can’t protect everyone, and must allow employers and voluntary organisations to exercise their own expertise and discretion.

The only credible solution would be for the ISA to be wound up.

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Self-employed home tutors, of whom there are 750,000 in the UK, have been asked to register by the agency – the Independent Safeguarding Authority – but are not obliged to do so. Three quarters of respondents in a poll of 525 tutors, conducted for thetutorpages.com, said they had no intention of registering on the so-called vetting and barring scheme. They said the database was intrusive and would damage trust built up between parents and tutors.

Four-fifths believe it will fail to stop abusers harming children, while 68% argue it will lead to miscarriages of justice.

Deryn Cullen, a cello tutor from Leeds, said the database implied tutors were “guilty until proven innocent”.

He said: “Whilst I appreciate the need for parents’ peace of mind, I have built up an excellent reputation as a teacher and responsible adult. I obtained an enhanced CRB certificate when I was working as a peripatetic cello teacher and no one has ever asked me to show it. I always give parents of my students the option to sit in on the lesson – especially in the early stages, when the child may feel insecure being in an unfamiliar environment.”

Henry Fagg, director of thetutorpages.com – a site that puts parents in touch with tutors – said many home tutors saw registration as “unnecessary, bureaucratic and intrusive”.

He said: “The very fact that the government has decided to exempt self-employed tutors, who regularly go into family homes, from having to register in the first place, speaks volumes. The reality is that tutors work very closely with parents and have a relationship built on trust. This scheme is in danger of undermining that bond of trust as it breeds the suspicion that every adult who works with children is a potential paedophile.”

What a brilliant article, which highlights beautifully the insidiousness of the ISA. It would damage trust built up between parents and tutors. It does imply everyone forced to be vetted is guilty of being a paedophile until they prove themselves innocent (and at their cost). It is unnecessary, bureaucratic and intrusive and will damage every relationship of trust between adults and children or young people which it covers. Presuming everyone is a paedophile actually puts children at risk, by diverting bureaucratic attention in entirely the wrong direction, leaving real abusers (who are rarely likely already to be on the database) to continue abusing the vulnerable undetected. Trust between individuals used to be a hallmark of how our society operated, but New Labour has decided it must now be after scrutiny by poorly trained and remote bureaucrats, and approval by vetting schemes. It’s not a natural way for anyone to relate to one another, let alone adults and children, and it’s good news that so many people are preparing to rebel against the ISA.

The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.

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According to his blog, Kevin visited the Bridges Shopping Centre in Sunderland with his son to spend the £10 his father gave the boy on a family visit. While there, he seated his son on a coin-operated train ride and snapped a photo of him with his cameraphone. At this point, a Bridges security guard came by and ordered him to stop taking pictures. He said that it was mall policy, and implied that Kevin was taking pictures because he was a paedophile. Kevin told him that this was ridiculous and took his son to find his wife and get out of the mall. He also took a picture of the security guard “so that if I later wanted to make a complaint to the centre I would be able to identify him.”

Outside of the mall, Kevin was stopped by a police constable who had received a complaint from mall security that a suspicious potential paedophile had been taking pictures on its premises. The PC threatened to arrest Kevin “for creating a public disturbance” and ordered him to delete the photo of his son. The PC also averred that the Bridges Shopping Centre is a hotbed of paedophile assaults.

Has the world gone completely mad? Threatening a man with arrest for taking photographs of his own son? And in what way is the shopping centre a ‘hotbed of paedophile assaults’? Do those (whatever the plod meant) normally occur in the full glare of hundreds of busy shoppers? Where do the police think this wave of alleged paedophilia, which merits such interventions and indeed a whole Independent Safeguarding Authority, is coming from?!

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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.

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Gym users at a popular pool have been asked to shower in their trunks and costumes when schoolchildren are around, it was revealed today.

After using the equipment at the Torridge Pool in Northam, Devon, members have been “respectfully” asked to wear swimsuits in the showers, if pupils are present.

The pool said it acted after “concerns were raised” by schools, and made the request to protect both children and adults.

General manager Bob Demott said there had never been any untoward incidents and stressed the measure was a safeguard for both children and adults.

He said today: “The measures we have put in place are pro-active. The schools felt uncomfortable that there were naked people in the showers when children were in the changing rooms.”

‘Concerns were raised’, despite there not having been any inappropriate or alarming incidents whatsoever. Concerns about what exactly? Adult, non-sexual nudity? Just what threat does adult, non-sexual nudity actually pose to anyone? Are children now not supposed to be seeing their parents naked, or be in their presence when they are naked? As with every other recent development connected with the ‘protection’ agenda there is no evidence that such ‘pro-active measures’ are needed. Hugh Bone, a local councillor, said:

“This surely is ridiculous. People should not believe that we are all perverts.

“Boys and men as well as girls and women have always changed in front of each other and this is part of the growing up experience.”

Except we’re now being indoctrinated into believing that everyone might be a threat, might be a paedophile, unless they can prove otherwise.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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(photo source)

Mary Dejevsky argues Britain’s version of America’s Megan’s Law is an improvement:

But this pilot Sarah’s Law was, in fact, very different from Megan’s Law, and potentially more effective for that reason. As a rule, it preserves the anonymity of registered offenders, leaving in place the incentive to remain above ground. Their disappearance is what prompts disclosure of identity. Information will be provided about convicted sex offenders in the neighbourhood, but only to those with a reason to ask. There are no police websites, where you can scan, voyeuristically, for paedophiles on your own, or someone else’s, patch.

The most innovative, and pertinent, aspect of Sarah’s Law, however, allows parents and other carers to ask the police whether someone with access to their children has a child sex conviction. This recognises that abductions, such as that of Jaycee Dugard in California or Sarah Payne here, account for a tiny minority of child sex offences.

The vast majority are committed by members of the child’s immediate circle, with fully 80 per cent taking place in the home of the offender or the victim. Mothers who might have concerns about a new partner are among those encouraged to use the service, and in the four areas of the pilot, more than 80 applications for information were received in the first six months alone.

It is true that Stacey Lawrence’s killer, although accused of assault by his former wife, would not have shown up in police records – even if Stacey’s mother had suspected anything (which she did not). Nor can it be known how often paedophiles seek out lone mothers, with a view to gaining access to their children. But what cannot be disputed is that there will be more cases like Stacey Lawrence’s than will have drama of Jaycee Dugard’s, and that Sarah’s Law is better framed to protect children than Megan’s – even if in Stacey’s case, tragically, it failed.

It’s a somewhat odd argument, which she concludes by arguing against. Firstly she’s right – there will always be a level of risk in society – for adults as well as children, but these laws are being pursued anyway; they are symptom of a prevailing belief in government that databases and registers can somehow protect us from all ills. It’s a dangerous delusion. Sometimes Sarah Paynes will happen, even if they’re as thoroughly supervised as parents could naturally be expected to manage, and Stacey Lawrences indeed can’t be 100% prevented – what about dangerous people who don’t appear on the sex offenders’ register? She fails however to acknowledge the other fundamental flaws in the ‘Sarah’s Law’ pilots – applying the same rationalised principles we do to our economy to the administration of our private relationships is just bananas – it’s not only counter-productive (adults and children becoming increasingly alienated from each other, children not taught to risk assess on their own), but it really won’t result in vulnerable adults being safeguarded any better than ‘Megan’s Law’ – is anyone really naïve enough to think the police with parents ‘and other carers’ can be trusted any more than a baying mob?

It’s a step forward to acknowledge that the vast majority of paedophile attacks happen within the close family, I’ll admit (though it fundamentally undermines the entire rationale for having an Independent Safeguarding Authority), but this project (as the ISA) undermines the basis of justice and the rule of law. It’s a dangerous road we head down if we accept the validity of permanent punishment, and doubly so when we remember that the categorisation of what’s now labelled as a ‘child sex offence’ has grown exponentially under New Labour – presuming that everyone on the sex offenders’ register presents an equal risk to children will just put hundreds of people who do not pose any threat into the line of fire. It misses the point – firstly why not look for people with sexual offences prevention orders (SOPO) rather than the less informative ‘child sex convictions’, but why stop there? If the aim is ‘protection’ why not do a full criminal records bureau (CRB)? Why not get ‘someone with access to their children’ vetted by the ISA? Where would it end? The milkman? New boyfriend? Child’s new best friend? Their parents? Their extended family? Where does the line get drawn? History has shown when such intrusion can be taken to an extreme it will be, and for how significant a benefit?

Is it right to try to protect children as much as possible? Of course, but to say Sarah’s Law is better than Megan’s because of a presumption that individuals who ‘need to know’ are less likely to threaten the safety of people on the sex offenders’ register than the general public, in a free-for-all information grab is staggeringly naïve. Sarah’s Law is just as much a hand-wringing sop to the child protection lobby as Megan’s Law, it will continue to increase alienation between adults and children, distort how private relationships are formed in this country, and lead us away from what was once a more enlightened understanding of risk assessment. We may live in a largely post-modern society but I have no desire for it to be run under The Jeremy Kyle Show’s principles. These pilots undermine the social fabric itself.

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