This current Labour Government seems to have a passion for passing laws & regulations and for making law abiding citizens feel like criminals.  Take the latest pearl of wisdom – the Independent safeguarding Authority.  You would have thought this would have been an agency that looked after perhaps road safety, or something innocuous but important. You would be wrong.  The ISA is to oversee the “Vetting and Barring” process.  This process will have mums and dads, volunteers and helpers have to go through a CRB check before be involved in voluntary activity with children. Existing CRB checks are inadequate. If you volunteer for 3 or 4 bodies, you will need 3 or 4 CRB checks at £65 a throw.

I understand the principal behind the ISA. Child protection does matter.  But in a way typical of this Government,  good intentions are swallowed by greater and greater state control.  Instead of just making sure people d id their jobs properly and are held responsible when they fail, the Government introduce a new level of bureaucracy to keep an eye on all the other bureaucracies.

So the fallout of all this will be less people helping local charities, teams and clubs. Not because they have something to hide but because they don’t like the state intrusion, the forms and the checks.  Even the NSPCC agree this is a bad bit of regulation.  I like to see the good in everyone and take people at face value.  But no matter what we do there will always be evil people.  The way to stop evil people is not by shutting down social interaction unless permitted by the state, but by existing agencies doing their jobs right in the first place and not over-compensating for the fear of failing.

We have to learn to live with risk. How we manage risk is the important question. Over-doing ‘protection’ at the expense of freedom, community, spontaneity, voluntarism and the building up of a community spirit. Instead, we are becoming ever more isolated and fearful of each other.