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Bichard Inquiry

I shall have write to the hon. Gentleman about whether that agreement has formally been reached. I reiterate that I am confident that the NPIA will be able to carry out the work programme that it has set. Points were raised about the quality of data and data exchange. Work to improve the quality of data on the police national computer has been ongoing. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, which has embedded the monitoring of forces’ timely input of data and the quality of their data into its baseline assessments, continues to work proactively with any forces that experience difficulty. The project to achieve the direct input of court results through the police national computer has been reinvigorated, but it remains challenging. The development of automatic resulting from the courts to the police is dependent on a number of factors, including streamlining the complex business process and having the right information technology in place. Nevertheless, the roll-out of the XHIBIT system to Crown courts was completed on 31 March 2006, which is enabling faster updating of court results to the PNC. The initial roll-out of the Libra infrastructure to all magistrates courts was completed in 2003 and the further roll-out of the infrastructure is pending Department for Constitutional Affairs and Court Service evaluation of the outcomes of the experiences to date. That clearly concerned Sir Michael, and we had hoped that improvements would be achieved sooner. The new case management system is now running in 16 courts, with another seven courts planned for this quarter. We have seen improvements to the Criminal Records Bureau vetting procedures, which include developing and implementing a quality assurance framework in partnership with the police service to standardise the disclosure processes across all forces. The CRB has reported that the majority of forces have now implemented the quality assurance framework following delivery of training with the remainder to be completed by the end of the financial year. In April 2005, the CRB also issued revised guidance to all registered bodies, further strengthening the disclosure application process. This is an appropriate point to reply to the hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne), who has raised points about CRB checks on staff who were in place before 2002 or teaching staff who have not changed their place of employment since that time. Checks were introduced in 2002, and from then it was strongly recommended that new appointments to the school work force who will work closely with children should be CRB checked. There has never been a requirement to CRB check school staff who were in the work force before 2002 and who have stayed in continuous employment since then, but such staff must all be checked against the Department’s list 99, which is the list of individuals who are barred from working with children in education settings. Checking against list 99 incorporates a check against the Protection of Children Act 1999 list of individuals who are barred from working with children in other settings. Today, the Secretary of State for Education and Skills announced that the revised list 99 regulations have been extended so that a greater range of offences will result in automatic inclusion on the list. They will include those who have received cautions as well as those who have received convictions for sexual offences against children. I hope that that reassures the hon. Gentleman and clarifies the requirement for CRB checking. In April 2005 the CRB issued revised guidance to registered bodies further to strengthen the disclosure application process. Under the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, we have enabled the CRB to seek access to relevant information from a wider range of appropriate data sources for vetting purposes. Those sources include the Serious Organised Crime Agency and HM Revenue and Customs. That will further strengthen the vetting regime. Most significantly, the establishment of a new integrated vetting and barring scheme for those working with children and vulnerable adults should be borne in mind. The scheme has passed to the Home Office following Royal Assent for the legislative framework. The Home Office is now working closely with the Department for Education and Skills and the CRB to establish the independent barring board, a new body that will manage all discretionary judgements under the scheme. That is due to be implemented in September 2008. We have made some significant progress, but the real challenge is that the changes must fit together with subsequent developments in a consistent and co-ordinated way. New business processes for information sharing must spread consistent good practice but manage and present information in a way that supports the needs of the new safeguarding arrangements and protects vulnerable groups effectively. The Government look to all the agencies and stakeholder organisations involved to reaffirm their collective, long-term commitment to working together effectively to protect the most vulnerable in our society. I turn now in more detail to the work that is being done, and to the points at the heart of the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, Central. On the subject of the IMPACT programme, the key strand of work is on the development of new national information-sharing capabilities across the police service. The IMPACT programme is charged with delivering seven of the recommendations made by Sir Michael Bichard, but it has a much wider remit to tackle the root causes of the problems that led to the failings in the use and sharing of information and intelligence across the police service identified in Sir Michael’s report. The programme aims to transform the ability of the police service to exploit its intelligence and other operational information much more effectively, which will enable it to manage and share its information more efficiently. Most importantly, it will progressively improve the service’s ability to prevent and detect crime and to protect the public. Change will not be achieved by the introduction of technology alone. We do not want to introduce technical fixes to operational problems that fail to deliver the promised benefits, which is why the impact programme is determinedly a business change programme. The aim is to change the way in which the police service manages and shares its operational information. The process will be enabled and supported by technical solutions that are carefully designed with specific operational processes in mind and matched to those business processes. The IMPACT programme is delivering that capability incrementally, giving the police service time to develop its business processes in a way that delivers the benefits. The programme has learned from past experience. The big bang approach to rolling-out new capabilities seldom delivers the promised benefits. The Government have learned across the piece from numerous programmes that introducing technology with an incremental build de-risks programmes and is by far the safest way to proceed. In that context, I can report substantial progress on the impact programme over the past year. Just over 12 months ago, the programme delivered the IMPACT nominal index, to which my hon. Friend has referred, to the child abuse investigation units of each of the 43 forces in England and Wales, thus fulfilling our commitment to implement Sir Michael Bichard’s second recommendation. However, I want to pick up my hon. Friend’s point about the INI being used primarily in child abuse cases. Child abuse cases amount to about 80 per cent. of inquiries, but the INI has been used to support other inquiries and has been trialled in other areas. On the advice of ACPO, we have not yet rolled it out more widely due to the likely demand caused by inter-force inquiries. I hope that I have answered my hon. Friend, but we must bear in mind the purpose behind the programme. The INI enables an investigating officer in any force to establish whether another force holds information about a person of interest and where that information is held, which is an entirely new operational capability. Previously, unless information about a person of interest was held on one of the central systems, such as the police national computer, or unless the investigating officer had some particular reason to approach another force, the information would have been invisible to him. Given that most operational information is held in local force systems, that was a serious deficiency. My hon. Friend has spoken about duplication. He has suggested that the existence of 43 million records would result in a lot of duplication on the INI, which is not the case. There will be more than one record per person, if a person has come to the attention of the police more than once, whether that involved the same force or different forces. Some people rightly have multiple records on the INI.