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.