Briefing Document: Regulating Trust – Who will be on the Vetting Database?

The Case Against Vetting logo
In October this year, the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act comes into force – requiring all adults who work or volunteer with children to register on a vetting database. Yet the rules on who – and who will not – be on the vetting database have not yet been written. The Manifesto Club’s Campaign Against Vetting has obtained a draft copy of government Guidance, which will spell out how the vetting database will work. We have reported this in a Briefing Document Regulating Trust: Who Will be on the Vetting Database?.

In this Briefing Document, we show how the government’s desire to regulate all ‘relations of trust’ between adults and children has created a suspicious and irrational policy, with absurd distinctions between who will and who will not be checked. We argue that the vetting database has wasted enough time and money, and done enough damage to informal relationships – and should be urgently reconsidered.