Peta Fluendy is employment law consultant at Sutton based De Brett and Co’s
http://www.iambeingfired.co.uk/
Plenty of employers will be relieved at the announcement this week that the compulsory Registration for the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) has been put on ice. It is probably too soon to put any correspondence from the Independent Safeguarding Authority(ISA,) that was set up to administer the scheme, into the shredder.
Both bodies were set up by the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 with the ISA responsible for running the VBS. The VBS was intended to list people deemed unsafe to work with children and vulnerable adults and to provide a registration system for those who were cleared to work with them.
The announcement last week is not yet a complete victory for opponents. The legal obligation on employers to report staff, they suspect of being unfit to work with children or vulnerable adults, to the ISA also remains, along with criminal liability if they fail to do so. Currently, roughly 500 referrals a month are being made by employers to the ISA about suspect staff. This work load is not expected to diminish, according to a spokeswoman for the ISA, despite the announcement.
What happens to those reported is anyone’s guess: The ISA was unable to explain to me anything about the results of investigations.
There is also criminal liability for employers caught hiring someone who is on the barred list to work with children or vulnerable adults or for hiring someone who has failed to register.
Voluntary registrations, which were due to start in July, have been stopped. There is nothing to say that the compulsory registrations planned to be phased in later will stop. The next tranche is due to begin in November this year and will require all new employees hired for the first time to work with children and vulnerable adults to register with the ISA before taking up their jobs. The government has said it will conduct a thorough review of the entire VBS before it decides how or if to proceed with this.
The ISA used to be known as the Independent Barring Board when it was set up – a clearer reflection of its purpose. Its Barring Scheme was never a popular idea. Most of the past publicity about it was bad. Horror stories about the reach of the legislation were common. Initially it looked as if even parents would have to register to give their child’s friend a lift to school. The previous government tried to end this by saying it was only those who worked on a formal basis that needed to register.
Opposition to the VBS continued though, with at least one judicial review planned about it.
This was chiefly because reporting obligations on employers had an unintended consequence: individuals faced losing their livelihood on little more than hearsay evidence. Anyone who ended up on the register of people deemed unfit to work with children and vulnerable adults were likely to be barred from their chosen profession for life, but quite possibly, unjustly. There were also concerns about the red tape for employers and expense for staff who were expected to pay to register themselves as vetted and fit to work.
The best advice is to listen out for the next announcement on this one – because the VBS may not be scrapped completely.
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