The second item on our agenda concerns consideration of the financial memorandum to the Protection of Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Bill. We agreed to undertake level 3 scrutiny of the bill, which means taking oral evidence from an organisation on which costs fall and from Executive officials. As the timetable for our report on this bill is tight, we have had to schedule both those sessions for today, although that is not what we would usually do.
Thank you for the opportunity to discuss with you our views and concerns relating to the Protection of Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Bill, as introduced in Parliament at the end of September.
The committee has agreed that John Swinney and Elaine Murray will take the lead in the questioning.
I thank Lucy McTernan for the written submission from the SCVO and the remarks that she made. I will start my questions by asking about the start-up costs of the scheme, to which she referred. The SCVO submission suggests that more than 100,000 paid staff in the voluntary sector might be liable to pay the fee of £26. Under the current arrangements, are paid staff or the voluntary organisations responsible for paying the fee?
In the vast majority of cases, the voluntary organisation will pay for staff who are moving post or new staff; they will not require the individual to pay. The new proposals will apply to existing staff, who may have been in their jobs for five, 10, 20 or 30 years or even longer, and it is to be expected that the voluntary organisations will expect to pay those fees on their behalf.
Paragraph 228 of the financial memorandum to the bill states:
I think that that relates to the passporting scheme, which is one of the new proposals that the voluntary sector welcomes. At the moment, under the POCSA regime, if somebody volunteers more than once or if they are a teacher or work in the voluntary sector and also volunteer, they have to have separate checks every time they engage with a new organisation. The fact that they will require only one check under the new proposals has been widely welcomed as a step in the right direction. However, it is not yet clear whether a check that is secured via the central registered body in Scotland for a volunteer will also be acceptable to an employer.
Is it your understanding that the Executive will pay the fee for an employee of an SCVO-affiliated voluntary organisation who is also classified as a volunteer who works with children or protected adults, or will the voluntary organisation or the individual be liable for the fee? That is the point that I am driving at.
Our understanding is that, if they have accessed the check initially as a volunteer, it will be free. The question is whether that check will be acceptable to a new employer.
The position is not terribly clear from paragraph 228 of the financial memorandum.
It is not. An awful lot of the detail of the regime's practical operation remains extremely uncertain. That is one of our serious concerns.
You make a general point that too much in the bill is left to secondary legislation. That is an issue that concerns the committee and has a bearing on our judgment of the financial costs. Will you identify the issues of delegated financial responsibility on which we might not have definitive answers that concern voluntary organisations at this stage?
We have a number of concerns about the future implications of the bill and about things that are not clear at this stage. One concern that is not strictly to do with secondary legislation is about the enabling power that the bill gives the Executive to change the fee structure. We are told quite explicitly that the idea is that the disclosure system should be self-financing. We know that the POCSA regime is also supposed to be self-financing, but in the one year in which that regime has been operating there has already been a hike of 47 per cent in the fee for staff accessing checks. We are unconvinced at this stage, particularly on the basis of the estimates of the number of checks likely to be accessed through the disclosure system, as to whether the self-financing system will work at £20 or £26 per check, or even at £62, which is one of the other figures mentioned in the financial memorandum. The real concern is clearly that, unless there is an explicit cap on fees, they could go through the roof.
The Executive has indicated that membership expiration would happen after 10 years, but that has been left to secondary legislation. The longer membership is, the lower the costs will be for the voluntary sector. Conversely, the shorter membership is, the higher the costs will be for the voluntary sector. We want policy statements and a degree of certainty from the Executive, so that we can plan ahead for the implementation of the bill's provisions.
You state in your submission that you believe that a cap on disclosure costs for the voluntary sector should be set out in the bill. Could you say a little more about what format you envisage such a cap would take?
I have already said that we are extremely concerned that the aim of making the scheme self-financing would be a justification for the Executive to raise costs—possibly in short order, as has happened with POCSA—to the point at which they are simply not absorbable by the voluntary sector, either in the phasing-in period or thereafter. We would like some reassurance, right up front, that the fee cannot go higher than a set point in proportion to the income of the voluntary sector. We consider that to be of primary importance; we also believe that the Finance Committee should consider the cap and that the Education Committee should also consider it in its line-by-line scrutiny of the bill.
I have a question about the implications of the POCSA regime. You highlighted the fact that disclosure costs have increased by 47 per cent in the first year. Can you cite any examples of the impact of that on the operation of organisations?
Over the past few months, we have been collecting evidence in the form of case studies from voluntary organisations. Russell Gunson has a few to share with you.
The main example of an organisation that has been affected by the POCSA system is that of an SCVO member organisation called Youth Scotland, which is the biggest non-uniformed youth organisation in Scotland. Over the POCSA implementation period, that organisation has seen a 15 per cent drop in the number of clubs, a 9 per cent drop in the number of young people attending the clubs, and a 9 per cent drop in the number of youth workers—both volunteers and paid staff—in the clubs. Youth Scotland has just about recovered to pre-POCSA levels, but now we have another piece of legislation to disrupt its work once again.
The SCVO's submission states that the administrative costs to the voluntary sector will be £20 million in total. How did you arrive at that estimate?
The examples that Russell Gunson mentioned are some of a range that we have collected from our member organisations. We have aggregated that evidence on the basis of our panel and database of the voluntary sector. It is fair to say that we are the leading authority on the size and shape of the voluntary sector in Scotland, which is why it is disappointing that, in the desk research that we understand the Executive officials did in preparing the financial memorandum, they did not ask us for information on the number of volunteers and staff members who will be affected to support their financial estimates. As we have shown, we have collected real-life evidence on the impact of the administration and fee costs.
Could you provide the committee with the calculation that you did? If it is a large piece of work, it could be difficult, but if you could give us even a summary of how the figure was arrived at, that would be helpful.
We would be happy to send that to you.
The Executive states in the financial memorandum that, although it accepts that there will be additional costs in the first three years of operation, there could be a slight saving over 10 years. That is assuming that 50 per cent of volunteering posts are judged to be within the scheme. Is that a reasonable assumption?
We have some major concerns with the calculation as laid out in the financial memorandum. We understand the argument that the nominal fee process will be more effective in the longer term than full checks and non-passporting in the current regime. As I have said, that has been welcomed by the sector. However, to claim that the scheme will save money is stretching the point too far. If we take into account the cost in the phasing-in period—we will assume that it is three years—and calculate the savings made in the longer term when there is turnover of staff, we estimate that it would take 15 years or longer for a break-even point to be reached.
If you were to suggest alternatives to the three-year period during which all staff are brought into the scheme and the 10-year expiration, if you like, of the scheme, what would be your suggestion for a more acceptable lead-in period and duration for the scheme?
Obviously, that is a matter for debate. It is fair to say that many voluntary organisations have been at the front end of calls for an effective regulatory system and disclosure system, because we ultimately want children and vulnerable adults to be protected. Stretching the scheme as far as 10 years might not achieve anything, whereas a phasing-in period of three years, unless it is properly resourced and supported, will be very hard on the voluntary sector. We are probably looking at somewhere in between—perhaps a four, five or even six-year phasing-in period would make the administrative costs more bearable.
I will ask you about your concerns. You expressed concern about the definition of "protected adult" because the range of individuals who could be considered to be protected adults seems to be fairly wide. How will that affect organisations? It could be argued that if an organisation deals with protected adults or vulnerable adults, it does not really matter whether a particular individual falls into that category at a particular time in their life; the organisation would have to go through this procedure anyway because it deals with adults in that category. Can you elaborate on your concerns?
We have concerns about the definition of "protected adult" in the bill. It is a service-related definition, which means that it could be fairly transient and fluid for organisations that provide services outside the regulated setting. For regulated organisations, most of the time all their clients will be protected adults. They will therefore have certainty. However, an ever-changing proportion of the clients of organisations that deliver services outside the regulated setting will be protected adults at certain points. We fear that it will be an administrative treadmill for those organisations to keep up with who is and who is not a protected adult at a particular point and therefore which of their staff can and cannot be a scheme member at a certain point in time. I suppose that we would need to work with the Executive on a solution to the problem. However, we can say categorically that the definition of "protected adult" that is used in the bill will cause huge problems and will increase administrative costs.
Can you give an example of the type of organisation that might have a problem?
The WRVS, which works with vulnerable adults, would be a good example. The overwhelming majority of its client group will be vulnerable adults, but only a certain proportion of its client group will receive the services that the bill specifies as meaning that the recipient is a protected adult. Therefore, only a proportion of the 12,000 volunteers will be allowed to join the scheme. The others will either go through the existing enhanced disclosure or not be in any kind of protection scheme. At certain points, a certain proportion of the WRVS's clients will be protected adults, but the proportion will be ever changing depending on what services those adults are in receipt of.
In Lucy McTernan's opening statement, she mentioned the need to raise awareness of the new scheme. Page 30 of the policy memorandum describes the procedure to be followed. In the example given, Mr Smith, who has been barred from working with children, moves to a new town and tries to offer piano lessons in his own home. The policy memorandum suggests that
We are concerned that the financial memorandum does not make sufficient allowance for the wide range of training and awareness raising that needs to happen. Our main focus is on training and awareness raising among voluntary organisations, which will need to comply with the bill and to work with the new scheme and all the changes that will be involved in moving from the current system to the new one.
I concur entirely, particularly given what I read on page 20 of the policy memorandum, which describes what a guide leader would have to go through to assess a potential new volunteer to be a guider. Do you have an estimate of a more realistic cost for providing detailed training? If so, is that based on the experience of voluntary sector groups of the cost of training for POCSA?
I hesitate to give a categorical figure here and now. What we would love to do—we had hoped to do it in the summer months—is sit down with Executive officials, work through the methodology of a campaign to raise awareness and to train people throughout the voluntary sector and put appropriate costings to that. The financial memorandum mentions a telephone helpline, yet best practice on the most effective telephone support exists in the voluntary sector. We could probably come up with a much better methodology and cost estimate if we were in direct negotiation on such issues.
I am interested in the cost of deterred volunteers. I have been reading Robert Putnam's book "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community", which talks about the collapse of involvement in volunteering in America. I am concerned that deterrence may be worthy of more consideration in the financial memorandum. Do you have any idea what the percentage of fallout of deterred volunteers might be under the bill?
It is difficult to put a number to that, because the reasons why people withdraw from volunteering or do not volunteer are numerous. We can tell you that the disclosure system is now the most often cited reason for people to give up positions of responsibility on management committees and is one of the major barriers to people becoming involved in organisations that work with young people.
Are you aware of any research or surveys that have been carried out to get an indicative feel of how many deterred volunteers may be out there?
It is hard to predict such matters, but on the basis—
I was asking whether any research has been carried out to try to get a more accurate feel of the situation.
Our colleagues in Volunteer Development Scotland have been monitoring that.
Does that organisation have data on the past levels of volunteering, the current trends and the forecasts?
It has detailed statistics on the subject, which we can send to the committee, if that would be helpful.
Is it possible to put a value on volunteers and come up with a figure that would augment the financial memorandum?
Several formulae are used to cost or value volunteer time. We could apply some of those formulae to give you an idea of the possible economic cost of the volunteer flight. However, the issue is not purely economic—it is wider than that.
I accept that totally, but do you agree that quantifying that value would make the financial memorandum more complete and illuminating?
The fact that the cost to volunteering is not mentioned in the financial memorandum is a major omission.
I have a question on the numbers and a general point that emerges from the SCVO's submission. Forgive me if I have got this wrong, but the order of magnitude of the difference between your estimates and the Executive's is such that it would be helpful to bottom out the matter. Your submission states that start-up costs will be £3 million, training costs will be £1 million and administration costs will be £20 million. That £20 million is associated with the figures of 850,000 volunteers plus 106,000 paid staff. Is it the assumption that checking those 950,000-odd people once at £26 per head would cost about £20 million? If so, that cost would be incurred in, say, years 1 to 3. Do you have any estimate of what the on-going costs would be as a result of people becoming volunteers or moving jobs and so on? I am trying to get information on what the net on-going costs would be. The Executive's assumption is that it would be less than £1 million from year 4 on. Is the figure of £20 million best understood as a start-up cost or an on-going running cost? Is that the cost to get everybody on the system and, if so, what will happen thereafter?
Our major concerns are about the first three years—assuming that the phasing-in period is three years—and about what it will cost to get everybody into the scheme to start with. The problem is that if we do not get people into the scheme effectively in the first three years, many volunteers will be deterred and services will be cut or closed down. The major concern is the hill that we will have to get over in the first three years.
For how long will a check have effect?
Russell Gunson touched on the point earlier, when he spoke about the expiration of membership of the scheme. As we understand it, the current proposal is for 10 years. However, on the basis of the figures that we have in front of us, we have calculated that, for the voluntary sector, it will take 15 years for the scheme to break even. However, only two thirds of the way through that period, we will have a new spike because people will have to have a renewed check.
Two issues are obviously at stake. I want to ensure that we understand the situation fully before we take evidence from the Executive officials. First, given that someone will not be checked again until year 11, the assumption—or hope—is that if they are not an offender in year 1, they will not be an offender in years 2 to 10. Is that correct?
The scheme will give updates on the individual to the organisation if there is a change to their barred status or if any new vetting information comes through. The scheme will last for 10 years and the Executive will provide those updates for the full 10-year period. The scheme is less about hoping that nothing will happen and more about informing an organisation if something does happen.
Secondly, by having a 10-year time horizon, it does not matter if someone changes job, as long as their status does not change. Someone can go from being a volunteer to being a full-time worker or vice versa, or move from the guides to the brownies. Is that correct?
When someone moves job or takes on additional employment, they need to go through a nominal check. A full check is made at the outset for which the proposed cost is £26. The nominal check is made each time that the person takes on additional work or moves employment.
Is that also true for volunteers?
The bill does not state specifically whether the nominal check will apply to volunteers or whether it will be free. We assume that it will.
So if, over the 10-year period, a volunteer moves from the guides to the brownies to the rangers, we do not know whether that additional check will require to be made each time.
We do not know. That is one of the uncertainties that we hope to clarify.
My last question is on your submission. You say:
It is fair to say that many people in the voluntary sector, myself included, feel very passionately about this subject. However, we find ourselves working with an inadequate regime that does neither one thing nor the other. In the sense that this new piece of legislation will hopefully put right some of the problems in the current system, you will find that there is quite a lot of support for it in the voluntary sector.
The new regime will bring one in four adults in Scotland into the net. The current regime is regarded as inadequate so we are going to extend the net even further, but there are alternative ways to examine the inadequacy of the current system without extending the net. How many individuals have been caught—I think that that is the right phrase—in the current, inadequate system? How much of an increase will it be to get to 950,000 adults?
Let us be clear that the POCSA system affects only new staff or staff moving employment at the moment. Disclosure Scotland's figures for the last full year placed the total number of checks in the voluntary sector at 60,000, and the total number of paid checks in the voluntary sector at just under 7,500.
That is what I wanted you to clarify. The current net captures 67,000—
No, the figure is 60,000 in total.
And the new scheme would capture 950,000 people. We are not talking about a tenfold but a 15-fold increase in the number of people caught in the scheme. Does the SCVO support that as a matter of policy? Does none of your member organisations have anxieties about that? It is an order of magnitude to move from checking 60,000 to 950,000 people; it sends a signal about the place of working with children and volunteering; and even the Executive estimates that we will spend £100 million on the scheme in the next 10 years. There must have been a policy discussion about whether the right way to protect children is to move from vetting 60,000 people to vetting 950,000 people.
To be clear, the SCVO represents the generic interests of voluntary organisations. We are here to say what the impact of the proposed legislation will be on voluntary organisations.
I fear that I am at risk of straying into policy dimensions so I will end here by saying that we are talking about a minimum of £100 million during the next 10 years for a scheme that will look at individuals only once every 10 years. I invite the SCVO to reflect on that before it gives policy evidence to the relevant committee. Will it continue to support this bill and the signal that it will send to the wider community? It will put a huge responsibility on the SCVO if it signals support for this sort of measure, which risks young people feeling that they are being criminalised for their desire to volunteer. The issue for this committee is whether spending £100 million, as a minimum, on a system that looks at an individual only once every 10 years represents good value for money for the public purse.
I want to pursue the argument about proportionality in a slightly different way. I do not know whether you will be able to answer the question or whether it would be better to pose it to the Executive officials. You said that 60,000 people are checked under the existing system. How many individuals fail that check?
The easiest way to answer that is to refer to the number of people who are currently on the lists that are checked against. The Executive will be able to tell you about that better than I can, but the last I heard was that the number of people was still fewer than 100.
I think that it is just over 100.
It goes back to the point about the hammer and the nut. We are checking a fifth or a quarter of the adult population of Scotland against a list of 100.
A quarter of the population of Scotland is being checked, at £20 a person.
It is hard to generalise about what route one of the relatively small number of people who might want to abuse children or vulnerable adults will take. Presumably, they will take the route with the least risk of their being caught out. It is fair to say that the vast majority of voluntary organisations operate high levels of scrutiny, recruitment discipline and supervision of their staff and offer the highest levels of service to the children and vulnerable adults involved. I would have thought that the levels of risk in voluntary organisations are, arguably, lower than they are elsewhere in unregulated parts of the community that deal with kids and adults.
I want to focus on proportionality. Would it be common sense to have a phasing-in system that was geared towards the vulnerable groups or organisations for which an external disclosure process is particularly relevant, rather than towards organisations for which it might be less relevant, bearing it in mind that someone inappropriate could seek work with any voluntary organisation? Is there an issue with the one-size-fits-all approach, which is disproportionate in relation to different kinds of organisations?
Very much so. In response to the proposals in the original consultation on the bill, the SCVO made suggestions about how the system could be tailored, with different tiers for different types and sizes of organisation, to reduce the bureaucratic burden and account for the different levels of risk. However, we see no recognition of that in the bill. We would value the opportunity to talk about that further.
If I interpret correctly what you say, you believe that there is an argument for a hierarchy to be adopted for the introduction of the new system—assuming that it is introduced—whereby an organisation's need for the proposed procedure or the appropriateness of such a procedure to the type of activity in which the organisation is involved might be taken into account. For some organisations, the procedure will barely be appropriate. Is that a fair summary?
Again, it is hard to generalise because the type of organisation is of less relevance than the type of service that the individual is involved in providing or the type of post or role that they have, and how routinely they come into unsupervised contact with a vulnerable person. As you say, it is extremely difficult to create a one-size-fits-all scheme that will cover all the different ways in which voluntary organisations or other public or private sector services interact with vulnerable people.
I am anxious to find out whether the whole elaborate bureaucratic system is geared to covering backs—perhaps in government or perhaps elsewhere—when the problem that it is supposed to deal with could, as you have highlighted, be dealt with much more cost effectively in a different way. Is that the view of the SCVO and its partner organisations?
The SCVO's current policy is that we want the existing POCSA regime to be reformed to put right some of the problems that are deterring volunteers and costing the voluntary sector a great deal of money. However, many people in the voluntary sector, including me, would say that if we looked at the issue again from the other side, we might arrive at a completely different conclusion.
Most of the different conclusions that would be arrived at would be less costly for the voluntary sector than the one that is proposed in the bill.
I would argue that they would be less costly not just for the voluntary sector, but for Scotland as a whole. The more we undermine voluntary action, the more we undermine our communities.
What will the million people who go through the proposed procedure get for their fee, which will be £20-odd or perhaps more? Given that an hour's checking will be done every 10 years, how thorough is the process? There are a million people to check. Surely the cursory nature of the checking means that it will be quite easy for people to slip through the net.
The Executive's proposals are that the full check—which will cost £26—will give the individual who goes through it membership of the vetting and barring scheme, which will mean that Disclosure Scotland's central barring unit will be able to update the individual's scheme record when their circumstances change and to pass on those updates to the organisations for which the individual works. Whether any system can handle a throughput of more than 956,000 people is an open question. I suggest that that is a question for the Executive.
Will you expand on that? Surely the follow-up work and the completeness of an individual's record are more important than the initial registration.
That is right. The scheme will stand or fall on the updating of its records and the passing on of those updates to the organisations concerned. It remains to be seen how effective the scheme will be—or we can ask the Executive now.
Many of the questions about the bill have been about whether the new system of checking against the combined list can work and where the information that puts someone on the list in the first place comes from. Some of that falls back on the voluntary sector. Under the current system and the proposed new system, there is an obligation on people in positions of responsibility in voluntary organisations to refer to the list if they have suspicions about individuals. Whether that duty is effective is as yet untested in the first year of operation of POCSA.
My question is an extension of the convener's. You indicated that the voluntary sector is worth £2.5 billion to the Scottish economy. You also said that you expect volunteers to melt away if the bill is enacted. How do you break up the £2.5 billion? Is half of it sports clubs, or a quarter of it the elderly sector? Which sectors are most vulnerable to the bill's provisions?
That sounds more like a policy than a financial question.
I got the £2.5 billion into it as a starter.
Our concern is not so much about finances. There are around 50,000 voluntary organisations in Scotland and the vast majority of them are small and local and in the fields of sport, arts and leisure. The big service providers in social care for children and vulnerable adults are smaller in number but larger in scale. Now that the bill extends provision beyond children and young people to vulnerable adults, it will probably affect 45,000 of the 50,000 voluntary organisations.
I want to press you for even the roughest estimate of how many of the 850,000 volunteers in Scotland—or one in four adults—will cross the line during any year and therefore require to be rechecked. We will also ask the Executive officials about that. As in the case of the council tax, I suspect that the number is much higher than the Government envisages. I will offer you a scenario in a moment, but for now, do you have any estimate of how many of those 850,000 might move from year to year from the brownies to the guides to the rangers and then back to the brownies? On your current understanding, if an individual were to do that, would they need to be rechecked every year and therefore four times in 10 years rather than once?
We could look at the 60,000 people who are caught by the current regime and find out how many of them hold multiple checks. I am one such person—I have two checks because I volunteer in two different places that affect young people. The current record held by one person is 37 checks, but that is just anecdotal and we could explore the subject more systematically if we wanted to. You are absolutely right to make the commonsense point that volunteers are likely to volunteer in a number of different ways with several organisations, which means that under the new proposals, they will have to get a new nominal check—the £15 or slightly cheaper version—on numerous occasions. The new system offers some advantages, but it is not as simple as it looks.
You said that you have had two checks and somebody else has had 37. That is partly caused by the definition of what constitutes an organisation. Suppose I take my children to church on a Sunday morning and I help out at the crèche. Then the children get a bit older and I take them to the Sunday school for three to four-year-olds. When I move from the crèche to the Sunday school, do I need a £15 redisclosure check, as you understand it under the current system? I offer a brownies to guides analogy.
I am sorry, what was the first—
The first example was helping out with the crèche for babies on Sunday morning at 11 o'clock and then taking my children to Sunday school when they turn three. On your best estimate, would I require the £15 check when moving the children from crèche to Sunday school?
At your crèche you would take a full check at £26. Three or four years later when you went to the Sunday school, you would take a nominal check at £10. However, those fees are not set in stone by any means.
You may perhaps not want to comment on this—we will also ask the officials—but on a Sunday morning when I help out at the crèche, the Sunday school or the youth fellowship, somebody might not turn up and I might ask my husband to come and help. It seems to me that, with the way the system is currently structured, we could easily oscillate 37 times backwards and forwards through the system.
We are already in the kind of situation that you describe, and have been since the Protection of Children (Scotland) Act 2003. It may be only for roles that are connected to children rather than to vulnerable adults, but people are already having to decide whether they have one, two, three or more roles, or whether they help out on Sunday mornings or not.
How has the figure risen from 60,000 to 850,000 volunteers? Forgive our collective ignorance, but that increase cannot be entirely due to including roles related to vulnerable adults. Some of the increase must be due to roles related to children.
Under the current system, you have to be checked when you take up a new job or when you move from one job to another. I have started two volunteering jobs that are new to me so I have had to have two checks. Other people who are teachers or social workers or workers in voluntary organisations, but who also volunteer, can find themselves having a whole raft of checks.
I thank the witnesses for a very lively session.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
I welcome officials from the Scottish Executive: Andrew Mott is the bill team leader; Claire Monaghan is head of the children and families division of the Scottish Executive Education Department; Ian Storrie is from the children, young people and social care economics team of the analytical services unit; and Michael Proctor is an additional witness. I do not know where he is from so perhaps he could tell us.
I am from the children and families division of the Education Department and am taking the lead in setting up the new agency that is to be created.
Thank you. The panel may make a short opening statement, as the previous panel did, before we ask questions.
Given the statement that was made and what was said in the earlier evidence-taking session, we welcome the opportunity to discuss the finer details of the financial memorandum to the Protection of Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Bill.
You said that there had been a robust consultation process involving other organisations. I refer you to the consultation response that the committee received from the SCVO, which stated:
Andrew Mott will outline the consultation process that was used in producing the bill.
In March and April, we held a number of consultation events. At first we issued an open invitation, and then we tried to ensure that a representative sample of employers and users from all the different sectors was there. At that stage, the proposals were a lot broader and not as focused as they are in the bill, so we asked about what costs would be acceptable and got a range of figures back. Over the summer, we have worked up the detail of the policy from the consultation. It is only as one develops the detail of the policy that the costings come into sharper focus. As we were doing that, we had in our minds the feedback from the earlier events. The SCVO and others are also on the implementation group that we have, which meets every month to discuss relevant issues.
I am not sure about the background to your point about the financial memorandum and consultation. A commitment was not made to consult on the financial memorandum, although a commitment has been made to consult on all aspects of the secondary legislation, especially the fees, because we recognise the concern that exists in relation to those, particularly given the increase in Disclosure Scotland fees. Importantly, the bill provides for what we see as maximum flexibility around fees, although they will be subject to secondary legislation. They will not be "open-ended", as was stated earlier.
It is rather difficult for the Finance Committee to act as a guarantor of the public interest on an issue such as this when paragraph 201 of the financial memorandum states:
There is a distinction between the costs of the scheme, which are set out in the financial memorandum, and how those costs will be recovered, which is the fee structure. The financial memorandum sets out three possible options, but there are other options. For example, it might be decided that a subscription approach is the right way. That is the sort of thing that will be teased out in secondary legislation.
Paragraph 205 of the financial memorandum sets out the experience with POCSA. The fee was set but there was a lower than expected take-up rate, so it had to be increased by 47 per cent to balance the books. Given that recent experience, can you understand the nervousness of the Finance Committee about agreeing a similar proposition? The one that we have before us is styled on the same model—in effect, the fee will relate to the number of applications that are processed.
It is worth recording the fact that the 47 per cent increase covers four years of operation; it is not a 47 per cent increase over a short period of time, although I am not saying that the increase is not large—47 per cent is 47 per cent. However, the key aspect of the financial memorandum is the overall costs of the scheme, rather than the fee that is set.
It might be helpful to take a step back. The current system has no memory, so if someone reapplies for an enhanced disclosure, all the same checks have to be done again. The financial memorandum basically says that a certain amount of money needs to be spent on linking up information technology systems. Much boils down to ensuring that the police criminal history system, the Disclosure Scotland systems and the listing systems are all joined up. If there is that up-front investment in joining up the systems and the system has memory—if there is a scheme record that is, if you like, the corporate memory of an individual—the system can be run more efficiently and protection can be improved. We believe that the numbers make sense if you take a step back and look at it from that perspective.
We still have in front of us a financial memorandum that tells us:
There are two elements to that. The first is a bit of a sideline but it is worth mentioning that local authorities pay for the disclosure checks of some individuals as a matter of practice, although there is no legal obligation on them to do so. Leaving that to one side, the important thing is to look at the 10-year time horizon. We believe that the cheaper and easier nominal checks—which, we hope, will be easier to administrate—should not incur an additional cost over that time period. That is our basic argument. For example, in social work, the current procedure, I think, is that checks are done every three years. With scheme membership, local authorities could move away from that necessity.
Yes, but COSLA makes the fair point that there will be a substantial upsurge in the number of local authority staff who will require to be disclosure checked in the first three years in order to gain admission to the scheme. Off the top of my head, I cannot think how many local authority staff come into contact with children, but it will be a heck of a lot more than 46,000. If they all have to go through the system in the first three years, the financial memorandum is weak in saying that
Your question takes us back to the point about the need to consider the 10-year horizon—
I do not understand the point that you are making. There will be a three-year start-up period, will there not?
Yes.
I thought that everyone would have to be checked within those three years.
That is the assumption that was used to generate the costings in the financial memorandum, but it is not a legal obligation under the terms of the scheme.
The beauty of a financial memorandum is that it contains—I hope—definitive financial assumptions that can be tested. I am testing the assumption that local authority staff will be checked within three years and I want to get a feel for the financial implications of such an approach. In paragraph 224 of the financial memorandum, you say:
I will invite our economist to answer you in detail. However, the key point about paragraph 224 is that it refers to a 10-year life cycle. We accept that costs will not be evenly distributed during that period.
Members of the Finance Committee have a problem. COSLA tells us that in the three-year initial period—let us say from 2007 to 2010—local authorities will be financially up against the buffers and will have to find an extra £X million because of the bill. We must come to a judgment on that. In theory, there could be no costs over a 10-year period—I could manage away all sorts of costs over 10 years. However, there will be costs in the first three years—unless I am getting something wrong.
The key point is the interaction between overall costing and the fee structure. For example, a decision could be taken to spread the cost evenly over 10 years by having an annual scheme membership that carried forward. The cost could be evenly distributed rather than front-loaded on to users of the system. I accept the difficulty that the committee—
With the greatest of respect, that is not what is proposed, as I understand it.
In the financial memorandum, the overall costs are calculated and illustrations are produced about how costs might be distributed on the basis of three different fee models.
The Finance Committee operates with two budget time perspectives: next year's budget and its implications; and the longer-term spending review period, which is normally three years. Therefore, in a sense, an attempt to claim that future spending review periods might compensate for costs in the current spending review period is not relevant to the framework in which we operate.
The costs are in the financial memorandum. We place the costs on individuals, because the legislative requirement for the payment of the disclosure fee falls on the individual. We have no robust evidence of how much employers pay. If employers choose to pay the costs themselves, which they might, that is a matter of employment practice. Indeed, I will put on my economist's hat and say that whether employers are, ultimately, paying the cost is challengeable, given that they might simply pay £20 a year less in salaries or £20 a year more in council tax. We did not feel comfortable about making such assumptions so, in the financial memorandum, we made the assumption that because the legal burden falls on the individual, the cost will fall on the individual and not on the local authority.
The SCVO said in evidence to the committee that it was not content with the consultation on the cost of the scheme. On the basis of evidence from its member organisations on the cost of POCSA, the SCVO calculated that the burden on the voluntary sector would be around £20 million. Will you comment on that?
We would be interested to know how the £20 million figure was assembled. The scheme will operate at different levels, the first of which is the disclosure costs that arise when a person is recruited—we talked a bit about the fee in that context. Next, there is the duty to refer. We argue that good employers and voluntary organisations are concerned about the welfare of vulnerable groups, and the trigger for referral is serious. The employer or voluntary organisation must have dismissed the person or transferred them to other work. Referral would not happen on a whim. The organisation will already be doing a lot of work to manage the issue in the setting. The duty to refer is part of a tool to ensure that, if an organisation thinks that someone is not suitable to work with vulnerable groups, that is confirmed by their being put on a list so that they cannot work with vulnerable groups in other settings.
No. We closed the blinds because we decided not to have the sun streaming into your face.
This is the point at which the interrogation gets harder.
I take your point that the cost is theoretically borne by the individual and not by the employer, but you are widening the scope considerably by introducing the concept of a protected adult. If local authorities pay for checks on their employees, they will incur costs because they have large pools of people who work with protected adults. The SCVO said that it is difficult for those in the non-registered sector to know who needs to be registered and who does not. Because the definition of "protected adult" is rather loose, it is difficult to assess the cost of including that group of vulnerable people in the provisions.
It is important to bear it in mind that local authorities and others already do enhanced disclosure checks on people who work with vulnerable adults. There might be a shift to focus on the vulnerable adults who are relevant in this context, but it is not as if there is no activity on that front at the moment.
On the point about displacement, local authorities would still do all the checks if there was no disclosure system, but the disclosure system brings together the many checks into a one-stop shop. That is a useful tool for employers because, otherwise, they would have to go to lots of different people to gather the information that they need as part of safer recruitment practice. Smaller voluntary sector organisations and smaller employers are likely to lack the resources or the understanding of how to interpret the information and I suggest that Disclosure Scotland reduces the administrative burden.
Some of your calculations are based on the estimate that 50 per cent of volunteers will require to go through the process. Is that based on the current disclosure process?
It is based on evidence from Volunteer Development Scotland, but it is an arbitrary assumption. Volunteer Development Scotland gave us a list of reasons why people volunteer and it is fair to say that not all volunteers will fall under the provisions of the bill. I am not particularly strong on the definitions, but the information stated that 68 per cent of volunteers raise money. We assume that the other 32 per cent have contact with children and will therefore fall under the provisions of the bill.
Would it not therefore have been better to present a range of costs in the financial memorandum? Paragraph (i) of section 201 in the financial memorandum states that, if the 50 per cent assumption is wrong,
The financial memorandum, with model 3, contains figures for the worst-case scenario, which is that 100 per cent of volunteers will fall under the scheme.
I do not want to stray too far into the policy, because the Education Committee will deal with that, but I am a bit puzzled by Claire Monaghan's comment in her introductory remarks that people will not have to be in the scheme—that they will more or less be able to volunteer to be in it and will not be forced to be part of it. If people are not forced to be part of the scheme, what on earth is the point of it in the first place?
The key point is that it will not be an offence for someone to undertake regulated work while they are not a scheme member. The only way in which an employer or a voluntary organisation will know that somebody is not disqualified from working with children will be by pursuing the scheme membership route. One of the reasons for not creating an offence, as has happened in England and Wales, is that we acknowledge that issues will arise at the boundaries. One issue concerns understanding whether work is regulated. Another is that, to use Wendy Alexander's example, if we had such an offence and if a person did not turn up for Sunday school and somebody else was telephoned to help, that person would be committing an offence if they were not a scheme member. That would be an extremely unfortunate unintended consequence of the bill.
I understand the benefit in that approach for smaller organisations, but does that not illustrate a problem with the entire approach? It is either too prescriptive or, if we relax it, we remove the protection. There may be many small organisations that deal with children or protected adults and which may not be responsible in employing people in the way that larger voluntary organisations or local authorities will be. However, those organisations would not be committing an offence.
They would be committing an offence if they had someone who was disqualified undertaking regulated work. The only way in which they will know that will be by scheme membership. The assumption is that, for the majority of people who have contact with children or protected adults, employers or organisations will want the reassurance of scheme membership. We expect there not to be scheme membership only with those who have occasional access as a result of unforeseen circumstances. The bill will not mean that such people commit an offence, which is the right approach.
Claire Monaghan helpfully clarified some of the details of the scheme, but I want to revisit that. She said that employers will want to reassure themselves about employees. Of course, that should have been the case in Soham. An estimated 106,000 employees in Scotland will be affected. We are creating a scheme that will affect 10 times as many people as would be affected if we included volunteers. Perhaps we should probe whether we need to bring into the net another 900,000 volunteers to deal with the 106,000 employees.
An important point to make, which might have been missed, is that on the basis of our modelling of the workforce we estimate that between 300,000 and 400,000 of the 800,000 volunteers are also doing regulated work. A teacher in a school who volunteers as a scout leader would be doing regulated work in a school setting and in a voluntary setting. There is substantial overlap.
I am sorry to interrupt, but I am trying to get clarity on the numbers. At the moment, there are 450,000 in the scheme and there will be 1 million in the new scheme. Clearly, that is a difference of 550,000. Who are the 550,000 who are being brought into the net by the bill?
The 450,000 are not in the scheme at the moment. Approximately 450,000 go through the disclosure system every single year. Some of the 450,000 might have been checked the previous year. The only way in which someone can trigger a disclosure check at the moment is by moving post. If the people who are already in the net, from the children's workforce, were to move post, they would trigger a disclosure check.
We need clarity on the point about the 450,000 people being in the net, which Claire Monaghan raised in the first place. I am trying to understand how the net is being widened to include 1 million under the new scheme.
There are two new categories, the first of which is people who will be working with protected adults. Secondly, for the first time it will be possible to get checks for personal employers—the simplified statement of barred status—such as piano teachers and dance teachers to whom people entrust their children on a Saturday morning. It is difficult to completely disentangle the figures, because a number of posts, such as general practitioners and others in the health sector, will cover both children and protected adults. Do we have a figure for the number of people who will fall within the scheme just in the protected adults workforce? Presumably that is the figure that Wendy Alexander is interested in.
I am afraid that we do not. That is particularly problematic in the health service, where people would fall into the net for both reasons.
How did we reach the modelled figure of 1 million?
The data that are given suggest that there are 850,000 volunteers and 106,000 employees. I am interested not in the 106,000 employees, but in the 850,000 volunteers. How many of them are in the system at the moment? What extension will bring 850,000 into the new scheme?
Some 67,000 are disclosure checked at the moment.
A few things are getting confused here, so I will give you the breakdown of the 1 million. The 106,000 is the number who are employed by the voluntary sector. I am not sure that we know how many are in the scheme at the moment. On the basis of there being 1 million volunteers, we modelled that 350,000 of them would also be employed in the sector. We believe that the workforce in the sector to be regulated in the future is 580,000 employees; an additional 500,000 volunteers, who would not be captured under their employment status, would also come into the system.
And they are not in the system at the moment.
The system does not exist at the moment.
We do not have a scheme at the moment. That is the key thing. We have point-in-time checks.
That is what I am trying to get to. We do not have 450,000 in the system at the moment.
We have 450,000 checks done each year. We will then have 1 million scheme members.
If somebody moved jobs several times in a year, they would be checked three times, so they would show up as three—
We have figures on multiple disclosures.
I am trying to find out the width of the net that will be cast. I think that we have agreed that the legislation will cover one in four—around 1 million—adults in Scotland. How many of those 1 million adults are covered by the current scheme—can you give me your best guess?
A significant proportion would be covered if they were to move post under the current system.
No. I asked how many of those 1 million people, or 850,000 volunteers, are currently covered.
Well, 450,000 people are currently covered.
But that figure of 450,000 might simply be one person moving 450,000 times. You cannot say with any certainty how many people are covered.
Do you have any idea how many people are covered?
We have a handle on the figures for multiple checks, but we do not have any scheme against which we can calibrate such matters. Instead, we have a set of best guesstimates. I think that Michael Proctor probably has the best handle on figures for the present system.
The problem is that, as Claire Monaghan said, no scheme exists at the moment. Certain jobs are covered by part V of the Police Act 1997, which allows prospective employers to check whether an applicant has a criminal record. As a result of that, Disclosure Scotland received somewhere in the region of 345,000 applications; however, fewer than 200,000 of those applications involved enhanced disclosures.
As far as this matter is concerned, we are totally uninterested in employees. I want to know how many volunteers are caught in the current system.
We know that, every year, 60,000 volunteers apply to the disclosure system and that about a third of those applications are duplicates.
So there might about 40,000 such individuals in Scotland. Correct me if I am wrong, but will this bill not catch 20 times as many people?
That is not strictly right. The fact is that if people move post they will be captured by retrospective checks.
I should point out that the figure of 1 million also includes the employed sector.
I was referring to the assumption that there are 850,000 volunteers. At the moment, 40,000 people might apply to the disclosure system, and the bill will catch 20 times as many people, which gives 800,000.
But we do not think that all those 850,000 volunteers will be eligible for scheme membership or will require to be checked under the scheme.
At the moment, if those 850,000 people were to apply for posts either in volunteering or in employment in those client groups, they would all come within the scope of the current legislation and would be required to have a disclosure check. However, an awful lot of people out there have never had any form of check, and some of them will be unsuitable. We know that, of the 200,000 or so enhanced disclosures a year, about 25,000 come up with some criminal information. The total figure is unknown.
That was the second point that I wanted to pursue. In her opening remarks, Claire Monaghan said that 117 names were on the disclosure list at the moment. However, she suggested that there would be information of interest on 10 per cent of the overall figure, which means that perhaps 99,850 will need to be looked at. How was that 10 per cent estimate reached? What criteria would trigger another look at an application? I do not believe that 10 per cent of the population have a serious criminal conviction.
It is not an estimate. At the moment, 10 per cent of enhanced checks reveal any information.
What information are we talking about?
It is wide-ranging. Michael Proctor will say a bit more about that.
Each year, somewhere in the region of 25,000 enhanced disclosures throw up information about criminal activity. Probably 1 per cent of those raise such serious concerns—for example, the people might have convictions for violent or sexual offences—that you would probably want to bar them from the workforce in question. At least half of those 25,000 disclosures throw up totally irrelevant information on, for example, driving or theft and dishonesty convictions. Such convictions might not be serious enough to bar those people from the workforce, but an employer might question whether they should be employed in the post.
Do 10 per cent of the Scottish population have a criminal conviction? That seems unlikely.
That is what the figures come up with. Ten per cent of enhanced disclosure checks return some sort of information.
In what proportion of those cases does the information relate to speeding, for example?
A large proportion of the convictions or intelligence does not suggest that the person is unsuitable. However, we can get at the Ian Huntleys of this world only by going through a process that identifies all the intelligence for individuals.
What is the nature of that intelligence? Is it just criminal convictions?
The information that comes up during an enhanced disclosure check is criminal convictions, spent or unspent, and any intelligence that the police hold about that individual.
The chief constable must deem that information to be relevant before it can be held; that is a key point.
What proportion of that information would consist of minor traffic offences, for example?
We are doing some more detailed analysis of what the certificates contain. At the moment, the disclosure system in effect produces the information, puts it on a certificate and lands it on the employer's desk; the employer must then make a decision on it.
Is all the information revealed to the potential employer? Let me draw an analogy. Let us suppose that I decide to volunteer at the creche at church. There I am, in my mid-40s with my two little children under the age of 1, and the church that I attend does not want to feel responsible if it has not disclosure checked people because that would leave the church vulnerable. It therefore asks everyone who helps out at the creche and the Sunday school to be checked by Disclosure Scotland. I am checked and a letter goes to the minister and the kirk session that says that, when I was aged 18 in 1975, I had a speeding conviction. That is what the proposed scheme will mean for 800,000 volunteers in Scotland.
That is what the scheme currently means.
We have just established that the current scheme covers only new volunteers, but we are bringing 800,000 people into the net.
That is an incredibly important area. I acknowledge that there is a concern that the bill could mean a reduction in the number of people volunteering.
To avoid the scenario that I set out, which is plausible—although I should put on record the fact that I did not get a speeding conviction when I was 18—was any consideration given to providing only relevant information to the employer? To provide information on any conviction, of any kind, at any point in the past 60 years, to every kirk session and guide group seems to me to be not only a profound invasion of privacy, but perhaps unnecessary, since our stated objective is not to have Ian Huntleys employed in our schools. You have talked about unintended consequences in managing down that risk. What consideration was given to whether an employer should be told of matters such as a speeding conviction, which patently have no relevance to child protection issues?
Over the past couple of months, largely in response to the concerns that we are hearing about the bill, we have been exploring with employers and organisations what use they make of the information and how valuable they find it. Our experience suggests that people in organisations are very mature in dealing with the information. They are human beings too, and 10 per cent of them will have speeding convictions and so on.
An individual should know their own history, if you like, so what comes out of the system should not be a surprise to them. As Claire Monaghan said, an individual can unilaterally join the scheme—without a countersigning body, in other words—so, if they want to, they can get a measure of its effects.
My experience is of the Boys Brigade rather than the scouts. If someone wants to drive a minibus full of children, they should go through a separate test or assessment that has nothing to do with disclosure checking and everything to do with whether they know how to drive a minibus as opposed to a car—which is what I happen to have a driving licence for.
I think that the point was an illustration rather than a general application.
I am not sure whether it was a good example.
A key component of the system is that it happens with the consent of the individual. When an individual becomes a scheme member, the organisations that are relevant to that individual are recognised, and no information—unless it is an indication that the person is barred—flows around the system without the explicit consent of that individual. Nothing in the information that an employer is being made aware of should come as a surprise to the individual.
My first question takes us back to earlier evidence from the SCVO that £360,000 of training money was used in three months to help with the implementation of the current regime. As I understand it, the figure of £360,000 was for the voluntary sector alone. The figure in the financial memorandum for training for the new regime is £600,000 for the entire care and children workforce. There seems to be a discrepancy between funding for training for the current regime and funding for training for the new regime.
The figures in the financial memorandum were derived by looking at the extent of POCSA and uplifting the figures in line with the wider application of the scheme.
One of the key points is that this is not new. A large number of the organisations affected are now familiar with vetting and with POCSA. This is primarily about updating the system and covering the people who fall within the extended scope of the legislation. Ian Storrie might have some more detail on the figures.
According to the figures that I have, POCSA appears to apply to 41 per cent and we have upscaled on that basis. Is the £360,000 that was mentioned not comparable to the £1.4 million?
Yes.
The £1.4 million covers the development of training materials and the operation of a telephone helpline and includes money for the CRBS to develop its systems. I am talking about training. I think that the £600,000 is for the delivery of training. That is what matters. The £1.4 million includes other things and I do not think that money for the CRBS to develop its systems necessarily counts as money for training for the voluntary sector.
I am not sure whether the £360,000 is not comparable to the total of the four figures cited in the financial memorandum.
The evidence that we have from the SCVO is that the Executive made £360,000 available to the voluntary sector for training for one year. That is what I am comparing the £600,000 with. The £600,000 is not just for the voluntary sector—it is for faith groups and other public and private organisations. There seems to be a big discrepancy there.
We will have to check the exact figure that was spent on POCSA. The thinking behind the figures in the financial memorandum is that the strategic people in the organisations will be trained as part of the roll-out of the scheme. There will not be a big bang on day one; there will be a phased implementation, so the operational training can be embedded in the annual training, biannual training or whatever it is that organisations give their staff. The thinking is that by putting the training in at the top, it filters down through the system.
You think that the filtering down will be free and that there will not be an additional cost or a burden on voluntary sector organisations to do the additional task that you have identified.
We hope that, as part of safer recruitment generally, all organisations have an on-going training programme into which training on this can be embedded. The operation of the disclosure scheme is in general a relatively small part of employers' recruitment costs.
I was talking about volunteers, in the light of the SCVO evidence about volunteers. In an example given in the policy memorandum, there is lots of stuff about a volunteer going on to the Disclosure Scotland website and generating
I will talk you through that example. I agree that it sounds complicated—
It is complicated.
Okay. If I could talk you through—
It might have advantages, but it is complicated and training will be required.
Absolutely.
And there is not enough funding. According to the evidence from the SCVO, there is not enough money in the pot to ensure that training is done properly in the voluntary sector, let alone in the wider organisations that will be covered by the legislation.
We are happy to work with the SCVO and other organisations in developing the implementation plan and the details of the training.
But the scout leader would have to have fairly detailed knowledge about how the scheme worked to be able to log on and do that. Many people have problems even with online banking, and what we are talking about is a whole order above that.
There is an issue to do with awareness raising on which I will give the committee some background. There are two different costs, the first of which is a compliance cost. For parents employing a piano teacher, the system is entirely optional—it is a facility for them.
What is the point of it if it is optional?
It is an offence for the piano teacher to undertake regulated work if he is listed. It is also an offence for an organisation to employ a listed person, but it is not an offence for a parent to do so. The check is simply an additional tool for parents. Whereas previously they had to rely on the reputation of the individual, they will now have an extra check that they can make. There is no compliance issue.
How will parents know how that additional tool works?
Obviously, we will have to disseminate that.
How much will that cost?
I do not think that there is any provision for such awareness raising in the financial memorandum. There is provision for awareness raising only among employers, not among parents.
Having looked at the evidence that is available, you have rightly stressed that about 1 per cent of people have committed a crime that would give an employer—or, indeed, a voluntary body—serious concern about their working with children. Could that information not be provided, at a much cheaper cost than £100 million over 10 years, by simply creating a list of the 1 per cent of people who had those convictions against them and saying that it was an offence to employ them? The list could be made publicly available. If the problem is with only 1 per cent of 1 million people in Scotland—bear with me while I do the maths—we are talking about 10,000 people. Such a list would save having to create a system to check the records of 1 million people. I wonder why that policy solution, which would have a much cheaper cost, did not present itself.
One of the key points is the fact that people can be listed not just for a conviction or intelligence, but because of things that they have done in the workplace. POCSA currently provides for organisational referrals when people have done things in the course of their work that have forced their employers to remove them from unsuitable positions. That is not information relating to a conviction or intelligence.
Okay. So, how many organisational referrals were there in the first year under POCSA?
There were 67.
Those 67 people could be added to the list and notified. That would still save us policing almost another 990,000 Scots. That is not a frivolous point. It would save us a lot of money not to have to police 990,000 Scots.
The current disclosure regime provides all the information to employers. However, as we heard from the SCVO earlier, it is difficult for people who sit on the management committees of voluntary organisations to make decisions on the basis of their interpretation of that information. The new scheme will ensure that the information is considered properly and consistently so that, by the time they receive the information back, they will know that the person is not unsuitable for that type of work and they can take a decision on whether to employ them.
You have given us three possible sources for the information that is going to be held in the system: first, a criminal conviction; secondly, information that a chief police officer says is relevant; or, thirdly, information on an individual that has been referred by an organisation. I have no difficulty whatsoever with that. We know that 1 per cent of people have a serious criminal conviction and you have rightly said that you would want to increase the number covered to somewhere between 1 and 10 per cent. Out of the potential 1 million people in the net in Scotland, that would add up to a list of between 10,000 and 100,000 people. Why have we chosen the route of inviting applications from 1 million people when the only evidence that is held comes from official sources or referrals from organisations?
I presume that the point is that to find the needle in the haystack there is another route.
And what is that route?
The point that you are making is that the sources of information could be used to say, "This is a needle; therefore, it will be on the list."
I am asking whether there is any mechanism in the scheme—under which 1 million people have to apply—for capturing more detail as a result of applications than is available through criminal convictions, the chief police officers and organisational referrals. You have told us that that is where the information that you send out to employers comes from.
I suppose the question is, if you want to find a needle in a haystack, do you do so by inviting every bit of hay to submit an application?
The key thing is that, with the bill, the answer to that is yes. We are exploring whether there is a different solution.
Whether you believe it or not, the financial memorandum says that the cost of running the proposed system would not be greater than the cost of running the current system. It is not fair to say that it would require an additional £10 million a year over the next 10 years.
You are asking one in four adults in Scotland to participate in a system whose outputs will consist of information that is held centrally. I am struggling with that. You are asking them to participate in a system whose outputs will be criminal conviction data that are already held, information from the chief police officers that is centrally held and information resulting from organisational referrals. What will be the gain of asking one in four adults to participate in such a system? You have not mentioned any outputs that would not be held centrally at the moment or that could be held centrally. How can it be minimally bureaucratic to ask one in four adults in Scotland to participate in such a system? There is a risk that if one in four adults participates in it, details relating to the 1 per cent of people in whom we are interested will be missed.
Having a continuously updating mechanism is a key advantage of a system. Unfortunately, people who want to harm children have a perverse incentive to try to stay below the radar and keep off the system. The proposals will create a database of scheme members that will allow processes to be triggered when new information or intelligence about such individuals comes to light, particularly when they move across jurisdictions. I see the advantage of the approach that you have identified at one point in time, but it does not carry the benefits that arise from continuous updating of information.
I am sorry, but are you saying that it is impossible for people continuously to update criminal convictions, information from the chief police officers or information from organisational referrals? Of course such information can be updated in real time. The issue is whether we need to have 1 million people participating in a scheme to capture information that is centrally held.
Of course such information can be and is continuously updated, but there is a missing connection between lists and people who are in the workforce. The scheme that you have suggested would require every employer and voluntary organisation to check lists virtually on a daily basis to ensure that none of the people whom they employ is on them. We aim to have automated checking to alert people. We want to make things simpler and more efficient.
We are beginning to drive too far into policy matters.
I want to bring the discussion back to costs, but I first want to ask Andrew Mott in particular a question about information. It was said that nothing in a disclosure should be a surprise. Paragraph 36 of the policy memorandum refers to conviction and non-conviction information. A footnote to that paragraph states:
You have raised several issues. First, there are mechanisms for correcting incorrect scheme records. Somebody who wanted to contest something could do so.
We have five minutes left. We have to focus on cost.
Okay. Section 80 lists all the relevant persons for the purposes of the legislation, including councils, chief constables of police forces, the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, the Scottish Social Services Council, the General Teaching Council for Scotland, care service providers, managers of educational establishments and registered social landlords. Those are all listed as sources of information. Does the financial memorandum include any cost prediction for those organisations? I am thinking in particular of the first three years when they will, all of a sudden, have to supply large amounts of information. Surely a significant requirement for staff time will be placed on all those who are listed as relevant persons.
For the purposes of clarity, the persons named in section 80 are relevant for the purposes of part 3 of the bill. They are listed for the purpose of sharing child protection information rather than information on vetting and barring. The organisations deal primarily with vulnerable children or those who may be presenting for child protection. The ethos of part 3 is to make explicit what is currently implicit. Financial provision is made in the financial memorandum for the costs that will flow from that, which are primarily to do with training and awareness raising.
But I am talking about the staff costs that will fall to organisations such as those that I listed in supplying information on one quarter of the population of Scotland, as Wendy Alexander pointed out. Surely that will require significant staff time for those organisations. That does not seem to have been factored into the bill.
For clarity, that is not what that section provides. The organisations—
Okay. In a footnote on page 7 of the policy memorandum, I note a reference to the relevant organisations that are expected to supply conviction and non-conviction information—local authorities and relevant bodies are mentioned. Surely significant costs will fall on those organisations in terms of the non-conviction information that they will have to supply on a significant proportion of the population of Scotland.
The bodies that fall within the scope of providing additional information for the vetting and barring provisions are primarily the regulatory bodies. Andrew Mott might want to say something further on that.
Is the General Teaching Council for Scotland included?
Briefly, the General Teaching Council already has a number of automated systems. Anyone can go to its website and check whether someone is a registered teacher. The website has a hierarchy of secure levels. We would like to work with the GTC to integrate its information into the Disclosure Scotland system. No big bureaucratic burden is involved. At the moment, if the GTC strikes off a teacher, Disclosure Scotland is notified. We want to make the best of technology to minimise the burden.
Integrating IT systems does not come cheap.
We have to close down the session. We have only one minute left and we still have another item to consider.
The key point is that Disclosure Scotland exists, as does the team that works on the disqualification list. The executive agency will bring together those two parts in order to discharge the functions that are provided for in the bill. We are not creating a non-departmental public body; it is an executive agency under a framework document that specifies the distance that ministers will have from the decision making. I ask Michael Proctor to add to that.
It is—
We are talking about a new executive agency. You will have to bring Disclosure Scotland staff on to Executive terms and conditions.
Yes.
It is an expensive way of dealing with things.
The key point is that the agency will offer users an end-to-end service. Instead of having to point people in one direction for disclosure information and another for barring information, the two functions are being brought together. Given that the agencies carrying out those functions exist, I am unclear as to how additional costs will arise from bringing them together.
There are a series of follow-up questions, which we will need to deal with by correspondence. I am sorry, but another committee is due to meet in this committee room at 1.30 pm and I will have to stop the meeting at that time.
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