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Disclosures for all?

Judith Gillespie's letter sent to "The Herald" on Thursday 31st January 2008.

Dear Sir,

The Government is currently running a consultation on the details of a new vetting and barring scheme that is due to replace the current disclosure system in 2009. It makes interesting reading. It states that since 2002, 2.4 million applications have been made for a disclosure check at a direct cost of £20 each. (The charge for volunteers, who apparently are checked for free, is picked up by the Government). If you add an equal sum for the costs to organisations of processing checks for their workforces, then you are looking at spending about £80 million to ensure that none of the applicants are one of the 226 individuals on the Disqualified form Working with Children List, many of whom have been put there very publicly as the result of a court case.

One reason for the large number of applications for disclosure is that, despite much use of the word "proportionate", the definition of child care, which triggers the need for a check, is so wide that it includes plumbers going to work in schools and construction workers engaged in building a totally new and completely unoccupied school.

This process is about to be extended to bring in vulnerable adults whom, the consultation suggests, should be defined as those in receipt of any NHS service - that should cover about 90% of the population. Those who provide that service would have to join the new barring and vetting scheme. However, people who have been deemed vulnerable adults by virtue of receiving an NHS service, then take that status with them when they receive other services so that "individuals will be doing regulated work (i.e need to join the barring and vetting scheme) because their client group are predominantly protected adults by virtue of receiving services from someone else". That should bring in most of the working population.

It would seem that the barring and vetting system will become as routine as getting a National Insurance number. Maybe this doesn't matter. However, the information that is provided to any potential employer is not just about whether someone is on one of the lists of those that are disqualified from working with either children or vulnerable people, it also includes information about spent and unspent convictions and, more worryingly, "non conviction information that the police consider to be relevant". Moreover, whilst some employers are making sensible decisions on how they use this information, others are developing a zero tolerance policy which means that they employ only those who have totally clean records. Finally, it has to be asked whether this whole process is really effective given that, certainly with children, some 80% of cases of harm are done within the domestic situation (by family and friends) which fall outside the checking regime."

Written by Judith Gillespie
Scottish Parent Teacher Council