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Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for giving me the opportunity to say more about the IBB and to cover ground that we covered in Grand Committee, when I made available to her the regulatory impact assessment, which covers the issue of costs. First, I shall explain the broad structure of the IBB and some of the criteria for selecting its members, as the noble Baroness’s amendments relate to the composition of the IBB. I shall also respond to her points about the members of staff, how they might be recruited, and what the total size of the staff will be. The IBB will have a chairman and members. We expect its executive to have a total of about 10 members. It will be able to appoint members of staff to enable it to carry out its core functions of deciding whether to include an individual on a list, determining whether to remove someone from a list, and considering representations. Its other functions may be delegated. We expect that much of the administrative work will be done by the Criminal Records Bureau, and will build on the bureau’s current expertise in data-handling. So the great bulk of the work, to which the noble Baroness referred, will be done by the CRB. We expect the IBB to employ about 100 staff in total—that is, over and above the number of members of the board. We also expect it to take approximately 20,000 decisions a year, and to bar about 25,000 people. I am told that the location of the IBB is unknown at the moment, but I will let the noble Baroness know what the options are as and when we have them. We expect the cost of the IBB to be in the region of £12 million to £15 million, over and above the existing costs of the Criminal Records Bureau. The IBB and its staff will need to be the best people, with relevant expertise. As I said in Grand Committee, there is considerable expertise in local authorities, and we hope and expect that expertise to be represented in both the membership and the staff. However, its members and staff must also have had experience in a wide range of professions other than local government. For example, the interim expert panel, chaired by Sir Roger Singleton, includes individuals drawn from local government, the chief constable of a major police authority, child psychiatrists, a representative of the National Offender Management Service, the chief executive of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, and a senior representative from the Children’s Society. Respondents to the department’s recent consultation on IBB membership suggested that it should include: experts in employment law and civil and human rights; experts on vulnerable older people; informal carers; human resources professionals; those engaged in, and with knowledge of, supported housing; professional and regulatory bodies; victim support groups; and many others. The length of this list shows that we cannot expect the 10 members of the IBB alone to represent all these areas of expertise, but we do expect the members of the IBB and its staff to represent all the necessary disciplines. That is why we need the larger membership that I have set out. But we do not want to put rigid quotas in the Bill, for reasons that I am sure the noble Baroness will appreciate. We believe that to do so would impose undue rigidities on the body and would constrain the Secretary of State’s ability to appoint to the IBB people with the best range of expertise as a whole to perform the tasks of the IBB. We also need members’ experience to be recent and to be coupled with knowledge of the situation on the ground. Secondees to the staff will have recent relevant experience, and we expect them to come from various sources, including, of course, local authorities. They will fulfil another valuable role; taking the experience of working in the IBB back to frontline services when their secondments finish. As well as secondees being among the IBB’s staff, paragraph 2 of Schedule 1 states that IBB members will be appointed on fixed-term contracts that cannot exceed five years. This will help to ensure that there is a reasonable turnover among members, and that their experience is up to date. I know that members of the Grand Committee were concerned that that should happen. I hope this gives the noble Baroness the information that she sought, and that it will enable her to withdraw her amendment.