Britain under the microscope – vetting still out of control

Friday February 17, 2012

Talk is cheap, says Josie Appleton. The government must force local authorities to put into practise its own common sense policy on CRB checks, many of which may be illegal.

In June 2010 home secretary Theresa May announced the scaling back of the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) regime ‘to common sense levels’. The government’s Protection of Freedoms Bill limits obligatory CRB checks to those working frequently or intensively with children, in an unsupervised capacity.

Yet this significant shift in government policy has had a negligible effect on vetting practice on the ground. There were in total over four million CRB checks in 2011, a quarter of which were on volunteers.

Worse, many of these criminal records checks are being carried out by – or demanded by – state-funded bodies, including local authorities, Ofsted and Sport England. Indeed, local authorities carry out nearly a million checks a year, and our research suggests that are large portion of these checks are unnecessary.

CRB checks were traditionally being carried out on a limited range of child professionals – teachers, social workers, care workers – and the current government position advocates a return to these common sense levels.

Yet local authorities are currently checking everybody from tree surgeons to leisure centre managers, keep-fit instructors to parents volunteering at the school disco, burger van sellers to asbestos monitors. Indeed, receiving these results, I wondered if there is any job for which local authorities do not carry out a CRB check.

These local authority checks cost £45 million pounds of public money each year, at a time when local authorities are cutting back on frontline services. The highest checking local authorities – Devon, Hertfordshire, and Essex county councils – carry out over 20,000 CRB checks a year, at a cost of nearly a million pounds per authority.

These checks are largely carried out on low- or no-risk individuals – mothers’ helping out in their kids’ class and so on – and so do little to protect children, while a lot to obstruct volunteers and spread a general poisonous attitude of suspicion.

It is also likely that many of these checks are illegal. The Rehabilitation of Offenders’ Act 1974 restricts the request for criminal records information to a limited number of positions, which do not by any accounts include tree surgeons or burger van sellers.

The government’s shift in vetting policy is very welcome. There is a rare common sense attitude in the Home Office right now, and a recognition of the damage that over-cautious CRB checking can do to trust and community relations.

However, our research sends the sobering message that whatever the policy shift, vetting practice on the ground has barely changed, and that state agencies are at the forefront of the vetting frenzy. The CRB statistics for 2011 were barely any different to 2010 or 2009.

There are currently no effective procedures for the investigation or challenge of illegitimate CRB checks. We’re calling for the government to make a strong statement on over-checking – and for individuals subject to illegitimate CRBs to be able to challenge the request in an independent forum.

We’ll continue to expose over-checking authorities, so if you want us to take up your case do get in touch.

Josie Appleton is director of the Manifesto Clubwhich campaigns for freedom in everyday life. Their report, Vetting Tree Surgeons, was published on 16 February 2012. You can email Josie at josie.appleton@manifestoclub.com.