Prepare for yet more scrutiny of our lives

What sort of society plans to subject a quarter of its adult population to anti-paedophile tests?

Telegraph View

It might seem hard to believe, but the hand of government is about to fall even more heavily on the British public. From next year, when the Independent Safeguarding Authority is set up, more than 11 million people who want to work with children (or vulnerable adults) will need to be vetted on a new database. Moreover, much of the information on that database will come from the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB). And, as we report today, the number of people wrongly labelled as criminals or accused of serious offences by the bureau has doubled since last year.

The CRB was set up in 2002 for good reason: police did not have the time or resources to perform the necessary checks to keep paedophiles away from children and young adults. In its first year, it checked 1.5 million people. Now that figure has risen to four million. Once the new authority is in place, the number of checks will have increased eightfold in less than a decade. Some of the initial increase was a result of public fury at the CRB's failure to stop Ian Huntley being given a job as a school caretaker in Soham. That fury was understandable, though – given the fact that Huntley had only a motorcycle offence on his record – the failure was more one of policing: Humberside police knew that he was suspected of rape and indecent assault, but the information did not reach Cambridgeshire.

The cost of that blunder was an atrocious tragedy. But it also led to a gigantic exercise in shutting the stable door, which now sees elderly hospital volunteers subjected to humiliating checks. Meanwhile, as the BBC reported last month, a mysterious process called the "enhanced check" means that a woman can be turned down for voluntary work merely because she was once reprimanded by a police officer for leaving her children playing in the park while she dashed to the shops. And all this intrusiveness is in addition to the 1,570 people wrongly accused or given a clean bill of health by the CRB in the year to March 31. Of all civil service mistakes, these are the most indefensible: one filing error, one slip of the computer mouse, can ruin an innocent person's life. But this scale of errors is hardly surprising, given the massive increase in the CRB's workload.

Now a mega-agency looms. What sort of society plans to subject a quarter of its adult population to anti-paedophile tests? The answer is not that Britain is in the grip of a paedophile epidemic or panic: it has more to do with Labour's refusal to control the expansion of its own agencies. This is a Government with a passion for investigating the lives of ordinary citizens; it will not catch many extra child abusers in the process, but perhaps that is not the point.