Vetting: Mervyn Barrett speech

This is a speech given by Mervyn Barrett, communications manager at the crime reduction charity Nacro, at the Manifesto Club event, 'Checkmate: Has vetting gone too far?'.

Nacro has concerns about criminal record checks and these feed into our concerns about the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act. We are concerned that ex-offenders are not putting themselves forward for jobs, both paid and unpaid, which require Disclosure checks. We know this from the figures put out by the Criminal Records Bureau. Of the first 8.2 million Disclosure certificates issued by them, only 400,000, or 5%, had criminal record information on them. Given that a quarter of the population has a criminal conviction, you would have expected that figure to have been at least 25%.

There are two reasons why people are not putting themselves forward. One is that they fear discrimination, and they have good reason to do so, for people are routinely refused employment on the basis of old or wholly irrelevant cautions or convictions. For instance, last week I took a call from a recently retired man who was refused a position as a volunteer ambulance driver on the basis of a conviction for sleeping with his under-aged girlfriend. Granted it was a relevant conviction, but it was 46 years ago when he was a 16-year old who didn’t know that what he was doing was wrong, and he has worked for many years since then (in a pre-Disclosure age) as an ambulance driver.

A great many of the Disclosure checks are illegal. The Criminal Records Bureau allows them presumably because they don’t want to be accused by the press of putting vulnerable people at risk by refusing to carry out checks. However, it means that the Bureau colludes in the illegal activities of employers who effectively judge others who have broken the law in the past by a process that involves them breaking the law in the present.

The second reason that people do not put themselves forward is that they are too embarrassed to do so. Whether they were cautioned or convicted of shoplifting five, 10 or 20 years ago, or went off the rails as juveniles and then got back on the rails to go on to lead law-abiding and respectable lives, they often cannot bring themselves to disclose information about stuff that is personal, private and confidential.

A fortnight ago, for instance, I took a call from a long-standing member of a club who had been asked to agree to a Disclosure check because the club’s fundraising activities occasionally brought members into contact with vulnerable people. He was, incidentally, being asked to agree to an illegal check. The man couldn’t bring himself to disclose. He said he would make his excuses and resign from the club. He couldn’t countenance the prospect of an ancient conviction for theft coming to light. He was afterall a respected pillar of his community, a member of the club’s committee. He feared he would lose that respect and frankly his fears were justified.

Once upon a time, if you went off the rails when young but you stopped in time, you could still put your past behind you and lead a materially successful and law-abiding life, safe in the knowledge that your record would remain confidential. A Cambridge University study of men born in London in 1953 shows that 96% of those who had stopped offending by the age of 21 were leading successful lives at the age of 50, compared with 95% of those who had never offended. Sadly, any young man or woman going off the rails today will find it much more difficult to have the same life chances. They will find that their pasts come back to haunt them time and time again, and no matter how determined they are they will be denied opportunities. And with the introduction of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act, this will increasingly become the case.

I remember 20 years ago we were all astonished when we realised that the number of police checks had risen to some 100,000 a year. I remember the amazement 10 years ago, when the figure had risen to 500,000. Last year the Criminal Records Bureau carried out three million checks, and with the enactment of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act the figure will rise to ten million. If Basic Disclosures are introduced in England and Wales at some point, and surely they will for they have already been introduced in Scotland, then we will have a system of universal criminal record checks, and discrimination and social exclusion on a scale so far unseen.

This is unfortunate you might say, but what ultimately matters is the protection of vulnerable people and if that adversely affects some people then so be it. But do checks protect vulnerable people? Well, they certainly do not protect the majority of children. Research by the NSPCC and others shows that most abuse takes place in the home, where criminal record checks cannot reach. There is also anecdotal evidence to suggest that the perpetrators in the workplace are more likely not to have a criminal record, let alone a relevant criminal record. In a letter to the Guardian in March 2007, John Freeman, the Joint President of the Association of Children’s Services, said that ‘all the recent cases we know about of improper behaviour, some very serious, have concerned staff with a clean record’.

The CRB and Home Office issued a press release in 2005 highlighting the fact that 20,000 unsuitable people have had job offers withdrawn and been prevented from gaining access to children and vulnerable adults as a result of CRB checks carried out in 2004. The main offence committed by the 20,000 wasn’t violence or sexual offences. It was theft. Theft is a serious offence for sure, but not a relevant offence at least in terms of child protection. How many of those child abuse scandals during the 1980s and 90s had theft at the heart of them? Many of the other unsuitable people were refused employment on the basis of fraud and forgery offences, driving offences and being drunk and disorderly.

Despite its unsuitability, the research on which the press release was based is used periodically in defence of Disclosures. Last year, for instance, in response to a Mail on Sunday report that innocent people had been labelled as criminals as a result of Disclosure checks, the Home Office put out the 20,000 figure in defence of the CRB. In January this year the Home Office cited the 2006 figures in response to criticism in the Daily Telegraph. Yesterday, the Home Office published the 2007 figures to show what a good job the CRB was doing.

All that said, I actually think that checks do deter the small number of offenders who are a threat to children from applying for work with them. The problem, as I have indicated, is that the checks deter an even larger number of people who are no risk to anyone. That has consequences for us all. The children’s charity, NCH, has already put out a press release urging men to overcome their fears about being labelled paedophiles, and come forward to mentor boys aged five to 11 who are in desperate need of male role models.