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The Mappa procedure was put on a statutory footing by the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act (2000) as a means of co-ordinating information about violent and sex offenders between police, the prison service and probation officers. The system presupposes that only such agencies are capable of assessing risk or, indeed, are entitled to do so.
The 2005 guidelines for Kent police, for example, state that ‘disclosure of personal data should be exceptions to a general policy of confidentiality (Data Protection Act 1984 applies)’ and that ‘disclosure to members of the general public will very much be the exception to the rule’. Throughout the country, the bureaucratic hurdles to notification of any sort are astonishingly high. ‘Partial’ disclosure is strongly preferred to full identification of an offender. There is a woeful tendency towards jargon — ‘risk matrix’, ‘booster relapse prevention programmes’ — rather than action.
Last week Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, announced the findings of the investigation ordered in January by Ruth Kelly, then the education secretary, into the vetting of teachers. The inspectors found that ‘hardly any’ schools took ‘even the simplest of measures in terms of record-keeping’, and that procedures were especially lax in their dealings with supply agencies. Alan Johnson, Ms Kelly’s successor, has announced a tightening of regulations. But without the media furore earlier this year over Paul Reeve, a PE instructor on the Sex Offenders’ Register who was nonetheless cleared by ministers to apply for a teaching job, the Ofsted investigation itself would never have happened.
The Reeve affair ultimately revealed an extraordinary thicket of officialdom, poor communication and straightforward idiocy — a system apparently tailor-made for the devious child abuser in its provision of loopholes. Mr Reeve was cleared for work because he was on the Sex Offenders’ Register but not on the Education Department’s blacklist, ‘List 99’. There are seven such lists. Before she was reshuffled, Ms Kelly promised measures to unify the lists. But two years have already passed since Sir Michael Bichard, in his inquiry into the Soham murders, called for a ‘new register … administered by a central body’. Progress on this recommendation has been deplorably slow. Again, without media pressure it would have been even slower. In response to Mr Johnson’s announcement last week, Dr John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, warned that ‘there is a lot of bureaucracy here and [a check on a prospective teacher] costs £53 a time. The public will have to be patient.’ But where the welfare of children is concerned, patience is not an option.
The row over sex offenders in schools showed what happens when decisions are left to ministers. The Sweeney case has illustrated the failure of the Mappa system where a panel of professionals maintains absolute control over the management of a convicted sex offender who is released into the community. Parents are entitled to feel alarmed by these failures. To say as much is not to encourage hysteria but the opposite: if these concerns are not addressed more systematically, then hysteria will certainly ensue. It is for defenders of the status quo to explain how to prevent further panic.
The real lynch mob is the army of liberals and public-service professionals whose knees jerk when there is any suggestion that their monopoly over information might be broken and greater transparency introduced into the system. Mr Reid is investigating the application in America of Megan’s law, the legislation which enables the public to discover the whereabouts of child sex offenders. Opponents of the law argue that it encourages paedophiles to ‘go underground’ — although, in a system as faulty as our own, that is where many of them already are. It is also said that such disclosure triggers vigilante action; yet there has always been such action against suspected paedophiles, and never more so when the public feels it is not being protected.
It may be that Home Office ministers conclude that Megan’s law is not fit for import to these shores. But the first and most important duty of the Home Secretary is to maintain public confidence in the criminal justice system. Where the monitoring of sex offenders is concerned, that confidence is — with good reason — in tatters. Mr Reid is not only entitled to explore all possible solutions, but obliged to do so.
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