Sir Roger Singleton’s comparatively new Independent Safeguarding Authority has learned the hard way, during the past few weeks, that apart from walking barefoot through broken glass, there is nothing more potentially painful for a public body to do than burst into the heated, and very often overheated, world of protecting people from abuse. His has been the dilemma faced by social workers since the dawn of the profession: deciding what is an acceptable risk to take within a liberal society.
`People’ note. From next month a very wide range of duties will be transferred to the ISA from other agencies, designed to increase our ability to protect all vulnerable people right across the generations. There have been enough cases in the past few years to remind us of the vulnerability of people with disabilities, or older, fully or near-incapacitated citizens.
The new measures are designed to plug gaps we know exist. The dreadful Soham murders, as well as exposing some incompetent activity by some public agencies, also showed that they too often failed to share information properly, and often failed to acquire it in the first place. Sir Michael Bichard’s report, which prompted the creation of the ISA, sought to remedy that situation. Abusers are no less cunning or dangerous now than when Ian Huntley sprang into the world’s headlines, but our capacity to thwart them has grown more effective.
If the desire and will to protect are there, though, we do need to keep at the forefront of our policy making the balance between the limits we seek to impose on the extent of state power, and the risks we are prepared to allow others to run in order to maintain those limits. The question implicit in a comment from a contributor to a national newspaper recently should concern us: “is the time far away when we shall need Criminal Records Bureau clearance to live in a street where there are families with children?”
Although that eventuality is unlikely history, frankly, is on the side of the state. Clumsy though it can be, mistaken as it often is, the moral tide flowing at least since the Factory Acts of the 1830s has seen the state emerging as a major guarantor of individuals’ protection from harm and abuse. Communities, however boldly they might be romanticised by people to the right and left of the political spectrum have very frequently been totally inadequate to protect their young and old from harm.
And as the harmony and security of our longest-standing communities have been shattered over the past 40 years or more, sometimes indeed as a consequence of state activity in other sectors, so has the same state’s responsibility to the potential victims of that fracturing grown. It would be a mistake if, for purely economic reasons, there was a successful bid to turn that moral tide round.
Much of the Sir Roger’s new ISA will help discharge that responsibility. The new statutory duties to share information are fundamentally good moves. Bringing the administration of POCA, POVA and List 99 into a single agency, provided they are coherently managed there, has to be welcomed. As are new plans to update employers of an employee’s suitability to work.
There will be no harm, though, in his being asked to reconsider whether or not he has drawn the net too tightly around some individuals. It seems unlikely that trusted, non-paid friends and neighbours and relatives will unnecessarily be drawn into it. But those who have protested so far, and who will be reading his response in December with greatest care, need to remember that some of the most serious abuses in the past have been committed by those very self-same friends, neighbours and relatives whose usually innocent activities some wish to withdraw from state scrutiny altogether.
Yes. Sir Roger should look again at the full consequences of his proposals. But he is wise enough, and sufficiently clear-sighted, not to draw back too far…
Richard Jones,
Vice President,
Association of Directors of Adult Social Services
