NO2ID

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 954534.ece

From The Sunday Times
December 13, 2009

Paranoia casts volunteers as perverts

The authority set up to prevent the wrong sort of people looking after children has become a monster

Jenni Russell

Richard Graham is willing to go to jail. The Conservative candidate for Gloucester, a former diplomat and a pensions manager, is so appalled by the government’s plans to vet all adults who come into regular contact with children or vulnerable adults that he is prepared to defy the law. Under new rules, any volunteers who regularly supervise, coach or even drive children as part of an organised activity must be cleared by the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) or face a criminal record and a £5,000 fine.

Graham isn’t prepared to accept that the state should interfere in adults’ rights to trust one another. He and his son play for Gloucester City cricket team and at the start of next season Graham says he will, as usual, phone all the parents of under-18s to ask if they are happy for him to drive their children to games. If they say yes, that’s all the approval he needs. Should he be arrested, he’ll accept the consequences.

Graham is at one extreme in his reaction to the ISA. Manor community college, a school for 11- to 16-year-olds in Cambridge, is at the other. It has embraced the vetting and barring culture with zeal. Last week it put up notices announcing that no volunteers, visitors or contractors would be admitted to the school without an escort unless they had undergone an enhanced check with the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) — one that revealed every conviction, allegation and suspicion held on police computers. The head said proudly that “taking risks with safeguarding children is not something I’m prepared to compromise on”.

...

The caseworkers who will wield this extraordinary power are described by the ISA’s literature as “independent experts”, who are “highly trained”. I asked the ISA’s chief executive, Adrian McAllister, a former policeman, about their background. Were they, for instance, all graduates? He seemed puzzled by the question. No, he said. Most had life experience. They were former prison officers, or had worked in care homes, or came from the Orange call centres. He had never, he said, been convinced by the connection between educational attainment and being able to make good balanced decisions.

Many voluntary agencies which initially supported the ISA now feel it has become a monster. There are clear hints that this week the government intends to back down a little on some of the body’s powers. It hopes some minor changes will kill off public concern. It shouldn’t. As the protest by Graham and the head teachers shows, the ISA is just one part of a paranoid system. The balance between protection and trust needs to be urgently rethought.

Superb piece that identifies most of the problems with ISA in one handy cut-out-and-keep article.