Summary
"This report argues that the current scale of investment in vetting is out of proportion to its positive effects. Since 2002, criminal records checks have cost society two billion pounds, yet there has never been any significant research showing the effectiveness of mass vetting in child protection terms. The only major government research, in the early 1990s, concluded that mass vetting was of limited use and had potentially negative effects; this research recommended the limitation of vetting to a small number of posts. As former chief constableJulie Spence observes in this report, many police forces spend more time on vetting than on investigating child abuse accusations, or monitoring convicted child abusers upon release. That is, they spend more time and money monitoring a very large low-risk group – the general population – than the much smaller high-risk group of known or suspected offenders."--Pages viii-ix.
Contents
Author. -- Acknowledgements. -- Executive summary. -- Introduction: The failure of vetting reforms. -- 1. Regulating trust: A decade of vetting and barring policy. -- 2. Criminal records checks - a "safe adult" card. -- 3. Do criminal records checks work? -- 4. A different approach. -- Conclusion. -- Notes.