Saturday 5 July 2008

Government: We Can Trust Them With Our Data

Except it seems that, no, we can't:
Hundreds of innocent people have been wrongly branded as criminals by the Government agency set up to vet people working with children, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

People applying to take up jobs as teachers, nurses, childminders and even those volunteering to work with youth groups are likely to have been among those falsely accused of wrongdoing by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB).

Those wrongly accused by the CRB face having their careers blighted or being stigmatised by their communities. They also face having to endure an appeals process to clear their names.
Signs of life from the opposition, too!
Last night, the Conservatives said that blocking innocent people from working with children was "completely unacceptable" and that the CRB needed an urgent overhaul.
Yes, well, think it needs a bit more than that, frankly...

3 comments:

Longrider said...

This isn't particularity new - there were cases a couple of years ago where they screwed up people's jobs by giving them erroneous criminal records. The whole concept is based on paranoia and should be ditched, quite frankly.

Anonymous said...

"The whole concept is based on paranoia and should be ditched, quite frankly."

The CRB didn't exactly cover themselves with glory in the Soham murders, I seem to recall...

That seems to have led to the increase in scope, to the point where they have future plans to vet more than 11 million adults! Franhkly, I can't see it getting any better.

John M Ward said...

I think the greatest "criminal record" of modern times is this Government's record, especially on this topic of personal info and their desire to make an already bad situation even worse with their obsessive pursuit of personal info databases.