Carers or suspeCts? - Manifesto Club

Introduction: Suspecting Carers / 6 CRB Checking Carers / 7
sorting items at a hospice, serving customers in a charity shop, or teaching
social work in a university.
Introduction: Suspecting Carers
The discussion about CRB checks has so far focused on adults caring
for children. Yet there is another dimension to CRB checks and the
vetting and barring scheme, which concerns those who care for ‘vulnerable
adults’. Under these provisions, those working or volunteering
with medical patients, the elderly, disabled or homeless, must undergo
regular CRB checks. They would also have to register with the Independent
Safeguarding Authority (ISA), if the vetting and barring scheme
goes ahead as planned.
Alongside the child protection bureaucracy, therefore, there is now a
‘vulnerable adult bureaucracy’ – a system for the monitoring of social
workers, doctors, charity workers, and other members of the caring
professions who play a role in caring for other adults. As with adult-child
relations, adult-adult relations are also increasingly likely to be viewed
with suspicion, and those who purport to care are seen as potentially
predatory.
The number of adults defined by the state as ‘vulnerable’ has expanded
massively over the past decade, from a small number of unusually vulnerable
individuals, to a definition that now includes, in any given year,
over 80% of the UK population. In effect, the state has defined the vast
majority of adults as vulnerable, and those who offer care services as
potential abusers.
It is now common practice to CRB check carers including: doctors and
nurses; social workers; social work academics and students; workers
and volunteers with homeless, aged, blind or hospice charities. This
process has gone so far that some of these who are CRB checked have
little actual contact with the so-called ‘vulnerable’. They could just be
This report charts the growth in CRB checks of the caring professions;
the expansion of the definition of ‘vulnerable adult’; and finally, the implications
for service users, professionals and adult-adult interactions.
CRB Checking Carers
Prior to 2002, guidance for police checks was set out in Home Office
Circular 47/93, and covered people who applied for employment with
local authorities or schools for work that would give them ‘substantial
unsupervised access, on a sustained or regular basis … to children
under the age of sixteen’. 1
As a significant section of the adult population became officially vulnerable,
we have seen the extension of vetting to those working with the
‘vulnerable adult’ population. And, in line with developments for those
working with children, not only those with ‘substantial unsupervised
access’ to ‘vulnerable adults’ required vetting, but any employee or
volunteer whose duties may bring them into contact with such people.
It is not even necessary to have any contact with a ‘vulnerable person’
to be required to undergo CRB clearance: merely having access to
confidential information about children or vulnerable adults is sufficient
for many organisations to require the vetting of their staff. 2 In other cases,
people are checked who have ‘access to information about vulnerable
adults’, for example care records – or who do intellectual work on vulnerable
adults, for example in social work academia. In a short space of
time we have gone from viewing the need to vet staff as a rare event in
very specific circumstances to one in which such vetting is ubiquitous.
Even drunk people are classed as ‘vulnerable adults’. A Christian organisation
that walks the streets helping drunken revellers at weekends
requires its volunteers to be CRB checked, since they are helping the
‘vulnerable’. 3 Homeless charities routinely CRB check the volunteers