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Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill [HL]

I rise to speak to a rather mixed series of amendments in this grouping, Amendments Nos. 21, 27, 31 and 53. I shall begin with Amendment No. 27, which is probing in nature and seeks clarification on the descriptions of how a child may be harmed. The Bill includes the words,"““incites another to harm a child””," but I suggest that an adult who incites one child to harm another harms both children. Amendments Nos. 21 and 31 address exactly the same issue. They would ensure that a referral of an individual made directly by the Secretary of State would be subject to the same level of scrutiny as referrals made by any other person. At Second Reading, the Minister said:"““I stress that the Secretary of State will not be engaged in the making of decisions on any individual whatever””.—[Official Report, 28/3/06; col. 758.]" Yet we can see very clearly that under these provisions all the Secretary of State has to do is to make a reference to the IBB. Here I refer to paragraph 1(3) of Schedule 2:"““On the reference being made, IBB must . . . include the person in the children’s barred list””." The same goes for the adults’ barred list. According to,"““any of the criteria prescribed for the purposes of this [section]””," the Secretary of State can include someone automatically. Those criteria can include a person who ““may”” do any number of things such as ““harm a child”” or vulnerable adult, or ““attempt to harm”” a child or vulnerable adult. Although I am sympathetic to the Minister’s intentions as laid out in his pre-Committee notes, which stated that this Bill is as much about prevention as it is about cure, I am reminded that at Second Reading noble Lords expressed concern that it could cultivate a culture of suspicion. My noble friend Lady Morris of Bolton told noble Lords about an anecdotal situation involving an honourable friend in another place who was stopped from being a Christmas elf for the day due to the need for CRB checks. That is a case in point. I have spoken to professionals in schools and know that their concern is that people will be deterred from working with children due to the fear that they will be falsely implicated in cases involving children. While I support every measure taken to protect the most vulnerable in our society, we have to be wary of alienating those who wish to work to help them—of course it is an incredibly difficult balance to strike. They need the reassurance that the system they elect to work in will be as geared towards fair treatment of them as individuals as it is geared towards the protection of those for whom they will work to benefit. There is a danger of over-engineering the safeguarding framework. I believe that there had been a drafting error on the Marshalled List which led to Amendment No. 53 being tabled in the name of the Minister, and I am grateful to him for his good nature in rectifying the mistake. The amendment follows on from my last point. We do not want to over-engineer the system so that it stultifies the goodwill of those who wish to enter the caring professions, a point made repeatedly and with some passion by noble Lords at Second Reading. Neither do we want to pass a law that enables the Secretary of State to make changes unchallenged. The paragraph the amendment seeks to leave out does just that. It states:"““Provision may be made for the criteria to apply differently in different circumstances””." In essence, it says that the criteria could be entirely subjective. I am grateful to the Minister for recognising the importance of this amendment and for supporting it. I hope that he and other noble Lords will also recognise the common sense in the other amendments I have spoken to.