Hansard

Liz Sadler is here to keep us all in order, as a guest from another department.This is an important bill that raises a number of complex issues with which I know the committee has been grappling. I look forward to reading the stage 1 report in due course. The committee is aware that a lot of time and effort has gone into child protection, for the good reason that a number of high-profile and tragic cases have occurred, which have rightly raised public concern. Some of those cases have involved sexual or physical abuse in the home. The biggest proportion of child abuse occurs at the hands of a parent, a partner or a close relative. The central public issue is to ensure that public agencies and professionals are in contact with the family and are equipped and trained to act properly to reduce the risk to the young person. That was the purpose of the children's charter and the extensive programme of improvements to child protection arrangements, which were based on taking responsibility and sharing information, on which the committee receives reports from time to time. However, some tragedies occur, because people in professional or other positions of trust betray that trust and harm children and young people. The central purpose of the bill is to build on the experience of the current regime—part V of the Police Act 1997 and the Protection of Children (Scotland) Act 2003—to streamline it, to reduce the bureaucracy, to eliminate the gaps in current protection and to extend protection to vulnerable adults, which is a new area for the Education Department and for the committee. The majority of people who work and volunteer with children and protected adults do so entirely with the safety and welfare of those children and protected adults at heart. Many of them provide all sorts of life-enriching experiences for young people. However, there are some people who would harm them and who use the workplace as a means of gaining access to them. The vetting and barring provisions in the bill will provide greater protection for children and protected adults and will prevent unsuitable individuals from entering employment or voluntary work with them. The bill will also deliver the means to remove them if they become unsuitable. Furthermore, it will provide an additional tool for employers to use alongside safer recruitment and protection procedures when determining the suitability of a person to work or volunteer with their client groups. The bill's proposals follow the tragic murders at Soham and derive from the principle recommendations of the Bichard inquiry. It is important to stress that early on, because it is the background to a lot of what the bill is trying to achieve. The recommendations called for a system of registering those people who work with children or protected adults. It is fair to say that the vetting and barring provisions have been warmly welcomed by almost all of our stakeholders, although there are issues on the detail. I am aware that a number of issues have been raised in evidence to the committee and in the Finance Committee's report. Some of those are matters of detail, but there have been concerns relating to the fundamental purposes of the bill and the perceived proportionality of the scheme. A view that seems to swirl around this issue is that children are overprotected to the extent that they lose the innocence of childhood and that people, particularly men, are discouraged from entering certain jobs or from volunteering. I take those concerns seriously, but I want to put them in context. It is important to remind ourselves of the central purpose of the bill—indeed, of the existing legislation—which is to protect children and vulnerable people from the attentions of some really nasty individuals who can cause them serious harm. There could be up to 10,000 individuals in Scotland who should either not be allowed to work with children or vulnerable adults or about whom there is information that should at least be considered by potential employers within the statutory, voluntary or private sectors. There is little argument about any of that, and there is a high level of agreement on the need for a system to keep many such people out of the workforce that deals with vulnerable people. The bill provides a scheme for those working with vulnerable groups and will make it an offence for a person to enter the relevant workforce if they are barred from so doing. Importantly, it will streamline and improve the current separate and, to some extent, cumbersome arrangements—particularly at the user end—for protecting children. The bill builds on the existing system by integrating disclosure and vetting arrangements and introducing continuous online updating of records. For the first time, it will introduce a list of individuals who are disqualified from working with protected adults. It will ensure cross-border integration and complement the legislation that has just been passed in England and Wales. It will ensure that the Scottish ministers are accountable for our systems north of the border. A lot of what the bill means in practical terms has been worked through, but along with our stakeholders we will continue to shape the provisions.The bill will reduce bureaucracy and on-going costs, because there will no longer be a need for repeat disclosure checks once a person is registered. I want to be clear that checks will remain free for people who work in the voluntary sector, who will benefit from a quicker and simpler system for repeat checks. There is little argument that such a scheme is necessary for those who work in the professional sector as teachers, social workers, youth workers, and in paid child care positions and so on. The situation in the voluntary sector is more complex, because the sector is itself complex. For example, it includes large organisations, such as the uniformed organisations—the committee has heard evidence from the Scout Association. Regardless of the legislation, they often have a central infrastructure to help them to deal with recruiting leaders and so on. The voluntary sector also includes smaller groups, such as small football clubs and parent-teacher associations, that have little or no infrastructure. Some of their volunteers work much more incidentally with children. That area has caused many of the concerns about the bill. Apart from streamlining the arrangements, the bill will give comfort and reassurance to volunteers, voluntary groups and parents that unsuitable people can be identified and rejected. The bill will support proper recruitment practices to ensure that only suitable people are involved with children. That aspect was called for previously by the voluntary sector and by the Education, Culture and Sport Committee in the previous session, during the deliberations on the Protection of Children (Scotland) Bill.Part 3 of the Protection of Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Bill, about which there have been some issues, deals with the separate but important issue of information sharing to prevent children from coming to serious harm, or indeed dying, because professionals are uncertain about when, with whom and to what extent information should be shared. I know that the committee has had concerns about the consultation arrangements but, as you are aware, the bill has been the subject of a number of stakeholder events, and the code of practice will be available—at least, in advance form—before stage 2. The code will be fully consulted on with stakeholders and the Education Committee.Important issues have been raised about children's rights, regarding confidentiality and health information in particular. I understand that you have heard about that this morning. Those are not new issues. They have been around for a bit, and we have a working group that is considering them in detail. They arise under current practice, and there should be ample scope to explore them fully in the context of the code of practice. They are at the heart of several incidents in which things have gone wrong through a failure to share information, and it is undoubtedly necessary to focus effectively on that area.I conclude my remarks by returning to the main vetting and barring part of the bill. The message that I want to give to the committee is that most stakeholders are signed up to the aims of the bill and to the shape of the arrangements relating to the workforce. There are concerns about how the bill will apply to the wider voluntary sector, especially to smaller bodies and those that are more on the edge. We want to continue to engage with those groups and to satisfy their concerns.We will continue to work out the detail with all the stakeholders, large and small, in the voluntary and statutory sectors. As we have said from the beginning, we will consult on secondary legislation covering a number of topics. The consultation topics will include fees, about which you have taken evidence; thresholds for barring; the phasing-in process—the retrospective issue—of the checks on the current workforce; information sharing; and guidance on the various aspects of the bill. We have always said that there will be consultation on those matters, and I state clearly that there will be full and effective consultation. We have an entirely open mind on the problems, issues and concerns that might be raised.There is a need to ensure that the smaller groups, in particular, are able to access speedily commonsense and practical guidance about what they need to do. The central registered body already has a role in that, which we can consider in detail. People need to know what to do about parents who go on school trips or day trips, about people who help at school discos and about the myriad different situations that can arise. Some of the scenarios that have been mentioned in evidence clearly do not have implications under the bill or its predecessor legislation and would not require the sort of checks that we are talking about. The scenario of legislation whose implementation is carefully considered and carried forward by subordinate legislation or by guidance is a familiar and proper one in the Parliament. Committees are rather good at dealing with it and with all the implications.I make no apology for returning to the point that the bill is all about further protecting Scotland's children and vulnerable people. It is also about ensuring that the vetting and barring and information-sharing systems are efficient, robust, sustainable and a considerable improvement on the current arrangements. I hope that the committee will come to the view that I have expressed and conclude that failure to pass the bill would leave us with an inferior framework that has several clear and identified disadvantages. I suggest to the committee that that overarching scenario is part of how we will examine the more detailed concerns, which I hope we can deal with—as we always do—at stages 2 and 3.I am sorry to have gone on a bit, convener, but I wanted to make many points in my introduction. I am afraid that I took advantage of your good will in doing so.