Health and Safety: Common Sense Common Safety

Lord Vinson Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vinson]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Young, on introducing this debate on Common Sense Common Safety. I so hope that his positive mind will soon be back at the centre of government.

The more society is regulated, the less room there is for common sense. Regulation becomes so all pervasive in the official mind that there is no room for natural morality. I should like particularly to draw your Lordships’ attention to the effects on society of the safety regulations that are being introduced by the Independent Safeguarding Authority and the Criminal Records Bureau.

Unintentionally, and yet insidiously, we are developing an unhealthy culture of suspicion that is the antithesis of the big society which the coalition, and indeed the country at large, would like to be developed. CRB vetting now includes 16 year-olds teaching younger kids to read, parents volunteering at school, and foster carers and friends running after-school clubs. All are subject to more stringent security tests for those activities than for selling explosives. Why not include postmen, milkmen and van delivery drivers? Where will it all end?

Of course, no parent wishes to see their children damaged by the action of paedophiles, but, in overall national terms, the level of aggressive paedophilia is minute and the incidents are vastly overblown by the press. A parent might think that the work of the Criminal Records Bureau safeguards their children, but that is in fact a total delusion. The Criminal Records Bureau can record only those who have had a criminal record, not those who have tendency to criminality; such people still get the job. The fact remains that most cases of paedophilia are caused by near neighbours, close relations or online operators, none of whom comes under the vetting procedures. The whole vetting exercise gives an illusion of probity without actually achieving the serious ends that it purports to achieve.

While some may welcome this illusion as being better than nothing, we are building up a society of mistrust, which even discourages adults from stepping in to help children in trouble for fear of being considered potential molesters and being reported to the police. Increasingly, we live in a society where adults distrust each other, and children are taught to regard everyone with suspicion. Paradoxically, vetting schemes further undermine the concept that the best protection for children is the vigilance of other adults.

Millions of people now face checks—many of them volunteers who particularly resent being told that they have to register with the ISA before continuing to offer the service that they have been providing for years. Such vetting assumes that people are guilty until proven innocent, and is gravely undermining the voluntary sector just at the point where we need it more. The bureaucracy to which volunteers are subjected is completely out of proportion to the informal and low-key nature of their activities. Checks cover flower arranging in a cathedral, working on a local newsletter, visiting elderly people to chat and do crosswords, or listening to children read in a school.

Child protection rules mean that volunteers are treated with suspicion and are subjected to humiliating and invasive procedures such as being accompanied to the toilet in schools, being asked to wear ID badges including their CRB number, and even being asked to list all their places of residence for the past 10 years. It is no wonder that volunteers feel totally disrespected or find the procedures insulting. They do not want to reveal personal information or have someone rummaging through their personal details. They resent paying £64 to the registering authority when they are giving their time for free. No wonder the CRB checks are killing voluntarism; indeed, they are a dagger at its heart.

As things stand, imagine a school trip being cancelled when a vetted mother, who was to accompany the children, falls ill and another requisite character cannot be found. Well, the simple way around all this is, of course, for all adults to be registered, and that is precisely what will happen. The logic is that the majority of the adult population will sooner or later find themselves on the vetting database. That cannot make sense. The whole procedure is doing far more harm than good and destroys the very roots of a caring society. Indeed, it is more likely to put our children in greater jeopardy, because instead of relying, as we used to, on references or word-of-mouth recommendations and common-sense observation, we rely on the vetting and barring scheme which, by its very nature, is far from infallible. All the bits of paper in the world cannot predict what someone is going to do.

It is good that the Government are considering scaling back the whole procedure to common-sense levels. However, therein lies a problem. These schemes are doing immense harm to our whole way of life, our national psyche and trust between individuals. The Government should have the courage to scrap these schemes or society will destroy itself. However, if, in an effort to change, the Government have to take the route to abolition step by step, they could at least first exclude all volunteers from any vetting or barring scheme. A mother should not be required to register on a vetting database before she goes to her child’s school. The process of CRB-checking volunteers is a common policy of councils, voluntary organisations and sports bodies, which is enforced by official bodies such as Ofsted and the Child Protection in Sport Unit. The process leads to more than 700,000 CRB checks every year and probably achieves next to nothing. Councils should be told that this is unnecessary, harmful and wrong.

The Government must roll back the child protection bureaucracy from at least voluntary activity, which is currently obstructed by many over-the-top child protection rules. These are as off-putting and as damaging as CRB checks themselves; and therein lies the problem of excessive precaution and over-interpretation—a point well made by the noble Lord, Lord Young, in his introduction.

In conclusion, I recommend a book that puts this far better than I can: Licensed to Hug by Professor Frank Furedi, published by Civitas. Its very title explains the damage that we are doing to our society, which between us we must try to prevent. The harmful futility of the work done by the Criminal Records Bureau, albeit with the best intentions, is another example of the damaging effects and the unintended consequences of overregulation. Sadly, it is only one example of the many hundreds of bad regulations that are not only destroying sensible and good human relationships but doing incalculable harm to our economy through the inefficiencies that they incur and the mistrust that they engender. We in this House all hope that the debate secured by my noble friend Lord Young will see a return to proportion and common sense in the regulatory world.