The ISA: the great child protection racket
Dominic Tobin writes in the Sunday Times:
Anyone, employee or volunteer, who “frequently” works with children or vulnerable adults could fall under the scheme. The ISA says frequently means once a month or more. People who are employed will have to pay £64 to register; volunteers will be able to do so for free.
When vetting people, the ISA will use records of convictions and other information held by the police, including unproven allegations. The ISA will also assess allegations sent to it by former employers and even anonymous tip-offs.
If you pass the vetting, you will receive a registration number enabling employers to check online that you are, in the eyes of the ISA, a trustworthy citizen. Unlike checks already offered by the Criminal Records Bureau, an ISA registration lasts until any reason surfaces for it to be withdrawn.
In effect the ISA is supposed to monitor every registered person all the time for new information. How this will work, the ISA could not say last week.
James Panton, co-founder of the Manifesto Club, a civil liberties group, and a politics tutor at St John’s College, Oxford, said: “It is a bureaucratic nightmare. I can’t see how they can monitor that many people all the time.”
November 11th, 2009 at 03:56
Para 1=correct.
Para 2=crude distortion. Unlike the previous Lists(7 or more) which were run by politicians and civil servants, the ISA lists (2) are compiled by a quasi-judicial body whose decisions are appealable in the higher courts. There are detailed and rigorous standards created by ACPO re use of soft intel, it’s not by whim. Employers are now required to report when they dismiss or ‘retire’ an employee after his/her work with children has been so poor as to put them at serious risk of harm. Plus (+) people like Vanessa George will be listed on release from prison and, unlike now, employers will have to check the ISA list. It will be unlawful (as it has been for years anyway) for such people to employ – and now for an employer to employ them. Shimple. Who says that is not (i) right and (ii) welcome?
Para 3=false. When employers check the ISA list they will see who is not allowed to work with kids. Not who is. The employee will have a certificate with number (and it will also be his/her CRB cert) and the employer will get their copy as now from a Registered CRB body.
Para 4=false. ISA will (a) be informed of people to be automatically placed on the Lists due to convictions in the courts and they will receive and assess information (b) gathered by the Police and released under ACPO guidance system above and (c) as notified by employers as above, which then will lead to an ISA decision to bar or not. Employers will be updated, based on ISA/CRB records as to the last known place a person is employed in such work. If their status changes from OK to barred, then the employer will be told. Again do you find that unwelcome?
Para 5=false. It is not monitoring of 11 million but of the far smaller number who are barred.
Let’s have facts not Manifesto Club’s blatant pseudo-libertarian polemic masquerading as such. Authors? Very notable ones? If one of them has been convicted or barred under laws which have existed since 1933 for the protection of children, they would commit an offence by entering a school. The ISA plus is that the school now has to check the ISA list. Ask any parents how they would react if they found their kids school had invited an author with a conviction for offences against kids to speak on the joys of poetry …. Ask the kids maybe? They get no say in who is invited to speak to them.
This is not Big Brother and if it is Nanny State then don’t we expect Nanny to look out for the children’s safety? And to use her knowledge to warn us of danger when she spots it? I know what I want her to do.
ISA is coming online because the CRB system showed systemic flaws. Haven’t Dunblane and Soham been enough to warn us of the crucial need to share information properly? This antiISA cobblers displays one thing above all – the low priority put on learning lessons to safeguard kids.
November 12th, 2009 at 21:44
Sorry, I don’t care much ‘quasi-judicial’ oversight there is on ’soft intelligence’. It is tittle tattle and should play no role whatsoever in stigmatising people. I don’t know what Dunblane has to do with anything. Stiling police failed to use the powers they had under the 1968 Firearms Act to strip Hamilton of his certificate. No creepy powers of surveillance were required – just taking note of the complaints that gun clubs had made against Hamilton.
“Ask any parents how they would react if they found their kids school had invited an author with a conviction for offences against kids to speak on the joys of poetry” This is not risk assessment; it is hysterical garbage. In the hypothetical event that such a person were invited to speak to a school, there is nothing untoward he could possibly do to the children. Fretting about this utterly unbalanced but alas is all too typical of the child abuse industry. Yet children continue to abused and killed – but none of them by authors invited to schools.