Last week I discovered that I have to have two separate checks made on me by the Criminal Records Bureau. One is because I am a trustee of a charity which works with children. The other is because I sometimes serve at the altar at Mass and therefore come into contact with children who do the same. In both cases, I have to produce documentary evidence of who I am and where I live to people who know these facts already, and I have to fill in forms in black ink with my National Insurance number and my unspent criminal convictions (none) on them. I have to do two forms for the same check because the Criminal Records Bureau ‘does not endorse portability’. The people in the charity and the church then have to process the forms. In the case of the charity, it has to operate via the local council which uses its services, rather than directly to the Criminal Records Bureau, and this means that delay can be considerable, which is a real problem when it is trying to get a volunteer worker started and has to wait months for clearance.
Are these rules wrong? It matters, after all, that sex criminals do not work with children. I think they are wrong. The minor reason is the time-wasting. As a trustee of a charity, I have almost no direct contact with children, so the threat I might pose is very small. As an altar-server, I am in full view of the congregation most of the time, and if I am in the vestry with a child, there are always other people about: my duties never involve seeing the children anywhere else. Both the church and the charity are small concerns; they have better things to do with their overcrowded time than deal with forms about me.
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