Clause 63
Policing and Crime Bill
6:45 pm
David Ruffley (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Bury St Edmunds, Conservative)
I am most grateful, Sir Nicholas, for your excellent guidance and forbearance. I am particularly pleased that you allowed me some latitude on clause 63. This important clause relates to checks on those who are or seek to be school governors, and it throws up a serious question. Subsection 13(3) of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 ensures that an officer who runs those checks does not commit a criminal offence if they do not make a check on a governor who was appointed before section 13 became law. That is a clear exception. Subsection 13(4) of that Act allows the Secretary of State by order to set a date when that exception will come to an end—a sunset provision.
It is important to understand how the time scale will operate, for the simple reason that that time-limited exception allows for a check not to be run against a governor who happens to be a paedophile. How long does the Minister expect that exception under the sunset provision to exist? I do not for one second suggest that Ministers have not got their eye on that; it is clear from the explanatory notes that they take the matter seriously. I seek to make no party political or other point; this is an honest inquiry as to how long the phasing out of the exception will take. There is a difference between the exception existing for three months and it existing for a year. None of us on the Committee, and certainly not the Ministers and officials, would want to see an exception, which is there for understandable reasons, lingering on. The longer the exception is there, the less focusing there will be of the minds of appropriate officers, because the exception removes the criminal liability of those officers who fail recklessly or negligently to do the required checks of school governors.
We want to ensure that the exception for those individuals who were governors before the 2006 Act came into force does not continue for too long. We want the norm to be appropriate officers making checks on all school governors, whether they were governors before or after the passage of that Act. It is on that question of genuine, honest, non-partisan inquiry that I, and many families and schools, would like the Minister’s guidance.