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.

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.

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’.”

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).