The Cost of Keeping Children Safe

As a mother of two, Lucy McTernan is naturally supportive of plans to check the backgrounds of those who work with children. As a member of the management board of an after-school club run by the parents, however, she knows that today’s proposals could be a death knell for many small voluntary organisations.

More than 120 young people attend the club in Portobello, Edinburgh, every week. Managed completely by local families, it offers working parents affordable childcare.

Under the Protection of Children (Scotland) Act 2003, from January 10, 2005, it became an offence for an organisation to appoint a person to work with children if they appear on a new list of those considered unsuitable to do so.

Disclosure Scotland figures show it received 7500 requests for checks from the voluntary sector last year, at a cost of £13.60 each.

Mrs McTernan, who also works for the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO), processed the forms for all the professional staff at the after-school club, including eight part-timers. Now she faces doing it all over again.

“For people giving up their free time to do voluntary work the bureaucracy and delays become a reason to question whether it is too difficult,” she said.

“It is completely contrary to all the government rhetoric about encouraging volunteering and community activism.

“Filling in all the paperwork takes a lot of time. We have had to wait three months before, and in the meantime the staff cannot work unsupervised with children. Every one will now have to be done from scratch again.

“The whole point of the club is to provide affordable childcare but it ceases to be affordable if we spend all our time and money filling in forms. Everyone wants a child protection system that works.

“But it has to work and organisations have to be properly supported.”

Last year, voluntary bodies warned against making such checks retrospective and ministers deferred the move, partly because of the sheer volume involved. This proved fortunate. After more than 10,000 individuals were checked against this new list, The Herald revealed in February 2005 there was only one name on it.

Officials say the system is fully operational, but today’s proposals will recommend at least one new list for all staff to be checked against.

The safeguards were prompted by the Soham tragedy.

The public inquiry, chaired by Sir Michael Bichard, found serious problems in information-sharing between police forces in England and Wales which allowed Ian Huntley to work as a school janitor despite evidence indicating he posed a serious threat to children. Huntley went on to kill schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

When the inquiry report was published in June 2004, Scotland was held up as a good example of police forces co-operating.

Disclosure Scotland, the body responsible for checking all those applying to work with children, was also praised.
However, police warned against complacency and ministers promised to improve the system.

Voluntary organisations have welcomed the safeguards but groups such as the Scottish Society for Autism and the Scouts Association said they would have to cut services to pay the costs of fresh checks on staff – many of whom will already been checked against other lists in the past 12 months.

Figures from the SCVO reveal there are 109,000 paid staff in the sector working with vulnerable groups.
At the current price of £20 per check this would cost them more than £2m.

There are also at least 850,000 volunteers. While they themselves would not have to pay, many work for tiny, informal organisations, such as village football groups, who cannot afford the administrative burden of processing the checks.

The Scottish Executive has indicated the cost of disclo-sure checks could increase to make the system self-financing.

Retrospective checks will be phased in over three to five years to ease the burden, but charities say they still will not be able to afford the cost.

Gavin Yates of SCVO said: “Any increase in these total costs to the sector would divert precious resources from front-line services protecting vulnerable groups and would threaten the existence of some voluntary organisations working with vulnerable groups.

“The voluntary sector does not have any slack in bud-gets and the executive must find transitional costs to ensure vulnerable groups do not suffer through the closure of projects or reduction in front-line activity,” he added.