Last January, Annabel Hayter, chairwoman of Gloucester Cathedral Flower Guild, received an email saying that she and her 60 fellow flower arrangers would have to undergo a CRB check. CRB stands for Criminal Records Bureau, and a CRB check is a time-consuming, sometimes expensive, pretty much always pointless vetting procedure that you must go through if you work with children or ‘vulnerable adults’. Everybody else had been checked: the ‘welcomers’ at the cathedral door; the cathedral guides; the whole of the cathedral office (though they rarely left their room). The flower guild was all that remained.
The cathedral authorities expected no resistance. Though the increasing demand for ever tighter safety regulation has become one of the biggest blights on Britain today, we are all strangely supine: frightened not to comply. Not so Annabel Hayter. ‘I am not going to do it,’ she said. And her act of rebellion sparked a mini-revolution among the other cathedral flower ladies. In total she received 30 letters from guild members who judged vetting to be either an invasion of privacy (which it certainly is) insecure (the CRB has a frightening tendency to return the wrong results) or unnecessary (they are the least likely paedophiles in the country). Several threatened to resign if forced to undergo it. Thus began the battle of Gloucester Cathedral, between the dean and the flower guild, a battle which is just reaching its final stage as The Spectator goes to press. First the guild asked why the checks were necessary. The answer turned out to be that the flower arrangers shared a toilet with the choirboys, and without checks there would be ‘paedophiles infiltrating the flower guild’.
The ladies of the guild snorted with derision. The cathedral retaliated with another burst of pointless bureaucracy. It carried out a risk assessment on the guild, which was completed in early October. And, of course, the assessors found that these flower arrangers were a risk and would have to be checked. When Hayter asked to see the assessment, she was told that this was ‘private information for the chapter and the council’. Hayter still wasn’t cowed: ‘Why? It’s a risk assessment on us! We must surely be entitled to see it?’
Annabel Hayter has become the figurehead of the growing resistance to the CRB, but she and her guild are not alone. All over the country, brave volunteers are digging in their toes. Lord Vinson, who acts as warden in the church of Ilderton, Northumberland, is another who refuses to be vetted. The CRB procedure is not just pointless, it’s dangerous, he says. It offers ‘an illusion of protection, an illusion of safety — and at huge public cost’. Checks are ‘turning off sound volunteers, and encouraging children to distrust all adults’. So far Lord Vinson has received a severe letter saying that the bishop is ‘very disappointed in your attitude’; ultimately, he will probably be asked to resign.
Though the church as an institution has become horribly infected with CRB madness, with a love of petty regulations and procedures, there are members of the resistance within it. The former Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, has delivered a broadside against ‘hysterical’ CRB checks. He realised he had to take a stand when he discovered his 80-year-old assistant filling in a CRB form, ready to present her ID documents to the very church she had served all her adult life.
Jeremy Hummerstone, a reverend of Great Torrington, Devon, held out for months against his archdeacon’s demands that he be vetted. ‘I’ve been in the parish a long time,’ he said, ‘and I took strong exception to being asked to go through with this. We don’t need all these rules — they should use their common sense as I use mine.’ But the archdeacon told him that if he wasn’t vetted, ‘the parish would be regarded as a dangerous area, and the police would have to come to our church fetes’. Well, said Mr Hummerstone, losing his patience, I have the freehold of the church office, so you can’t force me to comply.
It was when Mr Hummerstone retired and moved to Yorkshire that they finally caught up with him. The Exeter Child Protection Adviser reported him to the Independent Safeguarding Authority saying that he ‘persistently or recklessly failed to comply with the safeguarding policies and procedures of the organisation’.
This is the hallmark of CRB madness — it persuades even sensible, decent people to behave in the most ridiculous ways. It puffs up their self-esteem with an important-sounding title, then encourages them to use a slew of petty laws at their disposal to punish disobedience. Every Church of England and Catholic diocese has at least one full-time safeguarding officer (or adviser), who sits on panels with Orwellian-sounding names such as the ‘Multi-Agency Diocesan Safeguarding Management Group’ or the ‘Risk Assessment Panel’ of the ‘Diocesan Safeguarding Reference Group’. Each church parish must also appoint a child safeguarding co-ordinator, with responsibilities to ‘monitor the implementation of diocesan guidance’ at a local level. This structure does little to stop incidents of child abuse, but is highly effective at micromanaging the everyday activities of church workers and volunteers. ‘In a way, the CRB has become a new religious axiom,’ says Mr Hummerstone.
He is quite right. These officers seem to occupy a position some way above worldly or religious authority. But the crucial point, the reason we need a resistance, is that their power is growing. Very few of these rules come from central government or the law. Yes, they originate from government guidelines (cooked up in response to the Soham murders) but they have spread like a virus through institutions, fuelled by power-hungry bureaucrats, panic, fear and a collective sacrifice of common sense.
Institutions have invented their own child-protection case law. When Tom Addiscott, a church volunteer (and professor) refused to be CRB checked to help out with his church’s ‘tots and teddies’, he was told that it was ‘the law’ that he be vetted every five years. But there is no law that says this. Other organisations believe firmly that CRB checks are required every two or three years.
There is now a ‘safeguarding procedure’ for everything from ‘safe photography’ at nativity plays, to ‘appropriate touch’ for bell ringing, to rules on transporting children to and from church events. Take bell ringing. It was once customary for junior bell ringers to turn up an hour early to get extra practice with an expert — but now a second adult must attend as a ‘watcher’. The Central Council of Church Bell Ringers has produced guidance on maintaining ‘A Safe Environment for Young People in the Belfry’. Of particular concern is the situation where a young ringer’s bell is out of control, and an adult needs to ‘take hold of the learner’s hand to take control of the bell rope’. The document suggests that this hand-grabbing action be explained and ‘demonstrated to the parents during their early visit to a practice’. Bats in the belfry.
Similarly, the Musicians’ Union recently produced a video which told teachers that they shouldn’t touch children when demonstrating technique. But how can you teach a child to play the violin if you can’t rearrange her fingers on the fingerboard?
This year’s round of nativity plays will — in the age of camera phones — be less documented than ever, thanks to growing photo bans in schools and churches. As a concession, some churches allow parents to photograph so long as they only photograph their own child; others only so long as parents ‘focus on the activity not on a particular child’.
Child protection policies often demand two CRB-checked adults — one male and one female — with every group of children, no matter how small the group. One volunteer, Brian Denman, who runs The Club at Brentwood Baptist Church, describes how these rules wreak havoc in a tiny club: ‘The Club has a membership of about 12, half boys and half girls in the 11–14 age range, and we play games, table tennis, pool, PlayStation and have short talks. When our two lady leaders are not available, we cannot meet as we have girls and no female leader on site.’
The revolution is overdue. The CRB and other ‘safeguarding’ procedures have become part of a war not on perverts, but on the best and most decent members of our society and it’s these members who must follow Annabel Hayter’s lead and stand up and say ‘enough. We refuse to be checked!’ The coalition government’s review of the Vetting and Barring Scheme is extremely welcome, but it can only do so much. The contagion runs not through government but through the minds of officials.
Only if mothers, flower arrangers, violinists, choir-masters, reverends, teachers, parents and peers stand up to be counted; only then will the whole shoddy structure start to weaken, crack, and finally come tumbling down.
There is every chance the volunteers revolt will succeed. The institutions of child safeguarding have a formidable power, yet they are also vulnerable because underneath the very British desire to follow rules is another, deeper British instinct: to protect liberty. Nobody actually believes in these absurd rules, they have spread by acquiescence — and they can be stopped with a little resistance.
Every week there are new points of rebellion. Two mothers in Welwyn Garden City are currently petitioning outside their children’s primary school, calling for a reversal of the school’s photo ban which prevents them from recording this year’s nativity play. Annabel Hayter has not yet received her final summons for a CRB check, but she has her response prepared. ‘If I say, “I’m not going to be checked”, what are they going to do? If I carry on arranging flowers, will they get the constabulary in?’ Annabel knows that officers breaking up the spring flower festival would not be good PR. Annabel Hayter has begun to realise this battle can be won.