While campaigning in Brighton, I met a lady who wants to volunteer for Worthing Homeless. She's currently unable to volunteer because she is waiting for her third CRB check to come through. All this in order to be able to put items in a plastic bag in the Worthing charity shop. She says that the bureaucratic hassle had nearly put her off volunteering:

Two photographers have produced school photos with a difference - the children are lined up as normal, only facing away from the camera. The idea for the piece came when they tried to take photographs in a school - but were told they could only take one child, and only the back of their head.

A Lancashire health board has tried to make staff pay for their own CRB checks, which have to be renewed every three years. The staff, understandably, are rebelling and refusing to pay.

Whoever has to pay, the NHS and healthcare as a whole will lose. The cost of repeatedly CRB checking NHS staff at a time of cuts becomes ever more absurd. We need to turn this union-management dispute into a questioning of the policy of repeated CRB checks within the NHS as a whole.

A teacher just sent me an email detailing the effects of child protection regulations in their school. What is clear is that these rules really affect the daily life of schools, the ways in which parents are able to play a part in school life and attend events, or collaborations between pupils and groups in the local area:

'(i) When the parents’ choir rehearses school pupils are not allowed in the music department (because the parents are un-vetted)
(ii) When the annual tea-party for older people takes place the outdoor school loos are closed to children (unvetted adults on the premises again – who knows what Mildred might do with that zimmerframe...?)

I just received this letter from a lady who works in social care services, about the damaging effects of CRB checks in her profession:

'Modern social care services advocate that practice promotes participation and inclusion, and supports people to develop social networks and natural structures of support within their communities. However, a dichotomy exists within the social care system, which itself creates one of the greatest barriers to achieving this vision: the framework of vulnerable adult protection, and the organisational culture that it creates, means that it is extremely difficult for people to develop informal relationships within the community, outside of the regulated environment of care services.

I just received this from a Warwick charity worker:

'Lots of good charity workers are lost because they don't want to have CRB checks. Our charity in Warwick is Red Balloon Learner Centre for the education and recovery of bullied children and we feel that the checks are dangerous because they make people less watchful when the checks prove very little.'

A writer in York just sent us this case of a volunteer being asked about her housemates:

'I recently offered to help write some newsletters for the local police here in York. The volunteer manager was very keen for me to help an existing communications person generate content and so on, most likely working from home.

A school in Leicester banned a father from watching his son's egg and spoon because he didn't have a CRB check - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leicester/10558648.stm

An extreme case, perhaps, but not alone - we've had reports of demands for CRB checks for parents going on the rugby bus, or attending the school disco as helpers. In many cases these regulations are coming from Ofsted and other bodies. We need to expose the general climate, and official regulations, that lead to schools acting in this way, rather than to blame particular headteachers.

In our volunteering report we documented the harmful effect of vetting on volunteering. There is also a large nearly-voluntary sector - where people work with children for very little money, and yet because on paper they are 'employed' would have to finance their own CRBs. I remember my piano teacher charged £2.50 an hour - a token amount really.

This email comes from a trampoline coach who falls into this category - she calculated that it would take her 6 weeks to pay back the costs of CRB checks and other fees. We have already reported on the case of Peter Bulmer, a ski instructor who is in a similar situation.

The Society of Authors just sent us this statement in support of our vetting campaign:

'The Society of Authors supports the Manifesto Club’s campaign against the over-cautious and over-complicated procedures for vetting and barring of those working with young people. The current CRB system is clearly unworkable, with many of our members who work on a regular part time or voluntary basis with young or vulnerable people reporting the need to obtain multiple clearances for each site they visit or each group with whom they have contact.