Clause 42
Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill [Lords]
3:00 pm
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister (Education), Education; Basingstoke, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 4, in clause 42, page 26, line 19, at end insert—
‘(1A) Subsection (1) shall not apply if it can be proven that there is an error on the barred list.’.
This is a quick one, but it is important, and I look forward to the Minister’s response on it. The rules and regulations that we are discussing will have an impact on many thousands of people—I believe that the Government estimate that up to 9 million people will be covered by this monitoring, vetting and barring procedure—and, as the Minister acknowledged in Committee and on Second Reading, mistakes will be made. We highlighted the fact that the CRB has made 3,000 mistakes since it was set up. The Minister thought it appropriate to say that that was a small proportion of the total number of people who have been looked at, and that many thousands of people have been prevented from working with children and vulnerable adults as a result of the procedures put in place under the CRB.
Mistakes will undoubtedly be made; that has been acknowledged. I am sure that nobody in the Committee or who looks at this Bill will be complacent about that. The objective behind the amendment is to ensure that adequate compensation is in place if mistakes are made. There is a provision in the Bill that states that people will be able to claim their rights under other legislation, but I am not sure whether that goes far enough. There must be some accountability to ensure that data held by the IBB about barring, and the decisions that it makes based on that information are correct. We are talking about people’s livelihoods and reputations, and the amendment would create an incentive for the IBB to get it right and ensure that people have a more apparent and readily accessible form of redress if things go wrong. I look forward to the Minister’s response on the matter, which will be of great interest to many people.