Protection of Freedoms Bill

My Lords, this group of amendments deals with the vetting and barring of people working with children. I am grateful to the Minister for the meeting that took place with a number of your Lordships to consider these complicated and difficult issues. The breadth of attendance at that meeting indicated that this is a widespread, non-political concern about trying to get this part of the Bill to be as good as we can get it. The Government are trying to reduce the number of people and individuals who have to be subjected to a vetting process before they can be employed. That general objective of reducing the numbers who go through this process is entirely laudable, but the balance has to be struck between that desire to reduce numbers and ensuring that children and young people can safely take part in activities, knowing that the adults who are working with them are proper individuals who can be trusted with children. The legislation would include certain categories automatically, in an expectation that they would be subjected to the vetting arrangements. Yet volunteers and others may not be subject to such vetting if they are under day-to-day supervision, which the Government have defined within the amendments considered at the previous stage of this Bill. I do not believe that the question of day-to-day supervision, however defined and however much additional guidance is issued, will automatically be a helpful distinction. I think that many of your Lordships will have received a very helpful briefing from the children's charities, which have highlighted why this is an issue. They say that Clause 64, "““revises the definition of regulated activity which includes all the positions covered by vetting and barring arrangements. If positions are not included in regulated activity employers will not have to check people who work in these roles and even if they do, they will not be told if the individual is barred from working with children or vulnerable adults””." The situation is that as the legislation stands, people who are subject to day-to-day supervision do not need to be checked. Even if they are checked, the information that will emerge from CRB and enhanced CRB checks may not necessarily include the barring information showing that incidents have occurred in previous employments, or whatever else may be the case. That is where there is a serious loophole. Indeed, the briefing goes on to say: "““We are concerned that the proposed definition of regulated activity does not cover some groups of people who have frequent and close contact with children. This creates risks for children. Those who seek to harm children can be predatory and manipulative. If certain types of work are exempt from vetting and barring, in some sectors or settings, but not in others, dangerous adults are likely to target those organisations with weaker arrangements””." Let us be clear: this is not about activities that take place in a supervised environment. Obviously, you would trust any organisation to have arrangements to ensure that a child is not abused in a classroom or changing room. The risk is in the relationship that may build up between a child and someone who is in a supervised setting but who is a volunteer and has not been subject to proper vetting where the child and their parents will assume that that is a trusted person, someone who is safe. The risk is that the undesirable contact will not happen in school, at the after-school club or in the sports facility; it will happen separately and elsewhere because there has been an assumption that that person is trusted. At an earlier stage the Minister talked about the role of parents and said that they also had a duty to protect their children. No one is denying that, nor is anyone suggesting that it is possible with these arrangements to protect every child from every adult who may have malign intent towards them. However, this is about trying to ensure that you can protect children appropriately under the circumstances. I ask noble Lords to put themselves in the position of having a child in a setting that they assume is secure and where they assume that staff are properly vetted, only to be told after some appalling event, ““Well, we checked but we didn't have access to all the information about that individual because it was on the barred list and not included in the extended CRB check””, or, ““We didn't need to check because the individual was subject to day-to-day supervision””. At an earlier stage the Minister promised us that guidance was going to be issued about the nature of day-to-day supervision and about what could and could not be applied for. The purpose of my Amendment 4 is to try to make it clear how difficult it will be to frame that guidance appropriately. It is trying to say that, unless you are supervising the relationship between that adult and that child to the extent that you know the nature of all the conversations and the contact taking place between them, you do not know whether you may have created an environment in which the adult may abuse the child outside that setting. It is so easy for a helper to say, ““Oh, I've got the latest version of such-and-such a computer game at home; if you want to see it, friend me on Facebook and I will make the arrangements””. Unless day-to-day supervision prevents those conversations, that is where the vulnerability occurs. That is why there is a risk around this issue. I would love it if the Minister could stand up and tell us how the guidance would prevent those situations from happening. I hope that with this amendment I have clarified that that is the sort of thing that needs to be covered within that guidance. There are a number of alternatives here. One would be for a school, a club or whatever to say to children and parents, ““We have got proper vetting information about the following people who your child will encounter, but we are not able to obtain full vetting information about all the others””. That is not a satisfactory arrangement for the adult who is included in the second list, and it is certainly not an adequately safe arrangement. I am not clear how guidance on the issue of supervision is going to protect children. That is why I put my name to Amendment 5, which tries to move the argument on to say that it is important that organisations that are engaging volunteers and so on have the right to be given all that information. You are put in an appalling position if you run a youth club and have tried to do everything that you can, so you have run a CRB check, but you do not know, because you are not allowed to know, that the individual concerned is in fact barred from contact with children. However much day-to-day supervision there is, and however well specified it is in the Government's guidance, that situation will not be remedied. In responding to these amendments, I hope that the Minister will demonstrate how the Government will take on board the real concerns expressed by your Lordships from all four corners of the House, and make sure that Parliament is not inadvertently creating an appalling loophole that will put children at risk in the future. I beg to move.