I just received this email from a model flying enthusiast, showing how the vetting database is dissuading people from forming new clubs: ‘A local model flying club, due to reasons of its own lacklustre, has declined in membership to the point where it can no longer afford to pay the rent on both of its two flying fields. Accordingly it seems as if it will give up one of it’s fields come the years end. I and a few others were asked if we would be prepared to establish a new club at the field when it becomes vacant. Following discussions we…

The Home Office official, John O’Brien, gives a telling outline on Radio 4’s The Report (13 August) of who should be vetted. Someone should be vetted, he says, if ‘you get the opportunity to become familiar to them [children]’, and he says that ‘there is lots of evidence that the ability to build the relationship [with children] can lead to things like grooming’. He says that people who meet a group of children once should not be vetted, on the basis of ‘one-off contact not giving ability to form a relationship’ – but that organisations should be careful that non-vetted adults don’t…

Sir Michael Bichard, the man whose report into the Soham murders started the vetting database, is now having his doubts. In an interview in the Independent, he says that the regulations ‘need to be looked at again’ and that ‘there will always be situations where you could argue that the line has been drawn in the wrong place’. This shows the tide of opinion has shifted. It also reflects the fact that the government copied the database out of the report’s recommendations, almost without thinking about it. The desire to take ‘expert advice’ meant a social policy that was effectively copied up…

The sight and sound of children playing could be delightful or irritating, depending on your point of view. Yet now a school has blocked a planning application for new flats in Hornsey, north London, on the basis that the flats’ balconies will overlook a children’s playground. Chairman of the school governors said that these properties overlooking the playground could be bait to paeodphiles. ‘We’ve all read of cases where there have been examples of parents, families, fathers who are involved with child pornography regardless of whether they have got their own children or not. It’s not acceptable’, he said. The chairman conjured…

Being a children’s author was once a charming career, building mysterious worlds of fantasy trees and secret adventures. Yet children’s authors do meet a lot of children: they do readings with children, they get letters from children; they are admired by children. And this, according to Ofsted, makes them a potential risk. Before, Ofsted decided that children’s authors did not need a CRB check, but that they should not be left alone with children when they visited schools. Now the organisation has decided that they do need to be checked, even if they are supervised, ‘because there is a chance for authors…

This email from John Kirkby shows the murky dealings with the Criminal Records Bureau bureaucracy… ‘Last year, the London borough of Kensington & Chelsea discovered a “problem” with my CRB disclosure evidence. Around the same time my credit card had been fraudulently used and I’ve always assumed there was some connection between the two events. On contacting the CRB department, my enquiries were set aside by claims that my questions could not be answered for data protection reasons…in the meantime the police had contacted me requesting fingerprints & photos. ’The long & short of the matter was that my “problem case” was…