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Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill [Lords]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, which was raised earlier. It is important that we ensure that, however people come into employment, there is a robust process in place to scrutinise their background and appropriateness for the job for which they have applied. There is a third area in the Bill where we would benefit from further detail. In his report, Sir Michael Bichard said that effective vetting depended on information, much of which inevitably comes from the police. At present, the only provision in the Bill on data collection is that it can be outsourced by the independent barring board to the Criminal Records Bureau. Data is the IBB’s lifeblood. It has been at the root of many of the concerns in the reports produced in recent years by Sir Michael Bichard, Chris Kelly and Ronnie Flanagan. To be effective, IBB data must be of the highest quality. Those who are monitored need to have confidence in the way in which the data are collected, stored and updated. The IBB needs to have a quality control role on data, which it does not have at present given the way in which the Bill is constructed. That is particularly important when we consider the scale of changes that are happening to data collection, particularly in respect of the police. Hon. Members will be aware that the CRB has been criticised widely in the press for wrongly categorising 3,000 people as criminals since it was set up two years ago. That is a concern and I know the CRB that has been working on it. Given the volume of applications that it works with, it is perhaps in some ways inevitable. In terms of the data that the IBB will be dealing with, who will be weeding soft data? Many of the advances in the Bill concern the fact that the IBB can accept soft data that is not necessarily connected with a conviction or caution. Yet there is little clarity in the Bill about how that data will be dealt with, especially when perhaps soft data that is received is not felt to be information required to be kept on a person’s record. Who will monitor the reliability of the new PLX––police local cross-check––system, which is the police flagging system to which reference has been made? It is new and I have heard that it has questionable reliability at times. Finally, on data collection, there will be a new procedure for courts, rather than the police, to update criminal records. This is a big change. We all know that our courts systems are overloaded and that there is great time pressure. It will be important to ensure that, in giving a new responsibility to the courts, they can undertake the updates in a timely manner. Given all these changes, it is important that the IBB has a role in ensuring that the changes are appropriate and that they are introduced speedily. Ultimately, it must have confidence in the data with which it is dealing.