The one surprise about the extension of the Government’s Vetting and Barring scheme to parents who ‘regularly’ (how do you define regularly?) drive children to sports and social events is that unpaid volunteers apparently won’t have to cough up the £64 paid workers do.
Some minister with a calculator might decide to change this of course, as 11 million (the number of such volunteers it’s said) multiplied by £64 would be very welcome at the Treasury.
The V&B scheme is a revamped version of criminal record checks and seems to being applied wholesale to anyone who comes into contact with minors, even authors who give talks to schools bizarrely.
This is in case they should turn out to be another Ian Huntley, the Soham schoolgirl murderer, whose details eluded two police forces.
In time the scheme will no doubt be extended to anyone who escorts a child to school. That is, at least half the population.
Today’s John Humphries almost lost it this morning with John O’Brien, the bureaucrat in charge of the hapless scheme.
But, if it hadn’t happened, you couldn’t make it up, could you?