SHOULD adults who work with underage children be vetted by the police? Obviously yes. The whole system of criminal records and background checks was reformed after the Soham murders in 2003 when Ian Huntley got a job as a caretaker at a primary school despite 11 allegations of sex offences against young girls.

The principle is right, but the process “is a shambles”, according to the former chief constable of Thames Valley Police, Peter Neyroud.

“It’s riddled with duplication problems and often does not provide adequate protection for children,” he says.

The duplication clogs up the system because people who work for several different organisations – like teachers, Scout leaders, Sunday school assistants – need a separate check for each job.

Peter Neyroud’s case illustrates this. He got involved with his son’s local cricket team and wanted to coach. He achieved a ‘level one’ qualification as a coaching assistant, the most basic level, and he needed a Disclosure and Barring Service certificate.

Currently he is a Trustee of the Board of the Internet Watch Foundation which deals with barring access to child abuse images on the internet. For this position, Peter Neyroud has an ‘enhanced’ check, one of the highest criminal record and security clearances. He contacted the English Cricket Board and asked them to accept this higher check.

They refused and told him if he wanted to coach cricket kids he had to get a DBS certificate. He asked ‘why?’ and the ECB said that was their policy – end of!

“Imagine if I were a football coach as well and a scout leader and a school governor, I’d have to get a separate DBS check for each of these," he says.

The problem of duplication involves cost and time. One music teacher works for 12 schools in Oxfordshire and neighbouring counties and each school requires a DBS check at £48 per check, which he has to pay.

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The reason why few employers or sporting bodies such as the English Cricket Board will accept other organisation’s checks is a statement on the front of the DBS website that their checks have no “expiry date” and are accurate “on the day issued”. There is no automatic upgrading of the system and of the individual check.

The implication is that the DBS check is not necessarily accurate on the day after it is issued. So employers such as schools are playing it safe in order that they can say they had an ‘accurate’ check.

The system is so bogged down with multiple applications that the time targets are often missed. This music teacher with 12 DBS checks found last year it took 93 days to get them but should have taken 30. He lost around £1,000 in wages because he couldn’t work without the certificate.

The DBS offered to give him £150 in compensation of £1,000 lost pay.

An Abingdon taxi driver, Colin Dobson, was so frustrated by the delays he put in a formal complaint and got £50 in compensation.

Former chief constable Peter Neyroud, who ran the checks system at Thames Valley Police, has an overview of the problems.

“There are targets for time taken to complete the checks and Thames Valley is currently missing them. They say they need to recruit more staff. The Home Office say that they are fully funded from the fees for DBS checks," he says.

"But the reality is that the £48 does not cover the costs of the more complicated checks. It’s a bureaucratic quagmire and that’s not the best way to protect children. The force is left balancing the DBS staffing costs versus the cuts on the frontline and this will only get worse.”

The DBS 'quagmire’ is getting bigger. OFSTED has just given guidance to schools to extend the checks and include the family of those vetted. So now there are more than 200 teaching assistants suspended waiting for OFSTED to clear them after it was found that perhaps a partner of the teaching assistant had an old conviction.

So you could have a situation whereby an assistant married someone 20 years ago and at 16 that person may have committed a crime and has not repeated that kind of behaviour since, and yet because of a criminal record check on the partner, the assistant is now suspended.

Peter Neyroud says there is a solution to all this. “Why not give each person who applies for a DBS a Unique Reference Number which could give access to the online record for all organisations that need to see your DBS, like the scouts, church and schools," he says.

"The record attached to this number would be regularly updated so if the person comes to the notice of the police an automatic email would go out notifying all the organisations.”

Under the current system are all adults who work with children adequately vetted by the police? The answer is not ‘obviously yes’.

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