Statement on new government guidance on CRB checks
A lack of clear guidance about Criminal Records Bureau checks has been an ongoing issue for the volunteering community for years, so Volunteering England is very glad to see that the Office of the Third Sector has listened to feedback and taken the initiative to develop a new guidance document.
It is particularly helpful that this government guidance specifically addresses the needs of the volunteering sector. Volunteers often support children or vulnerable adults in diverse ways such as mentoring, befriending and coaching, and these roles may be quite different from the work of paid staff. We know that volunteer managers can find it difficult to apply rules around CRB checks to this type of situation. This national guidance will hopefully help organisations to understand when checks are necessary and cut down on the number of unnecessary checks carried out.
Furthermore, we are pleased that the new government guidance highlights the value of other safeguarding measures alongside CRB checks. From existing research undertaken by the Institute for Volunteering Research, it is clear that many volunteering organisations are concerned about levels of risk in their work. Our popular toolkit "How to take care of risk in volunteering" was published in 2006 to address this perception, and we hope that the new guidance on CRB checks will provide another risk management tool to volunteer managers.
It is also positive that the government has undertaken to review this guidance after the new Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) goes live in October 2009. The scheme will introduce new definitions such as "regulated activity" to describe when vetting is required, and we hope that the government guidance will be updated in due course to include these new terms.
Further information
