GOOD MORNING. Here is the news. Owing to a bank error, several thousand people have had their accounts emptied and credit barred, in some cases losing a job or university place. The bank refused to apologise, pointing out that it put the money back within three weeks — well, in 90 per cent of cases. It added that it is better to be on the safe side. In a separate incident, 2,700 blameless householders returned home to find bailiffs removing their furniture, owing to an IT error at a hire purchase company that assumed the stuff belonged to them. The company expresses no regret, saying that errors must be kept “in context” because sometimes two houses look similar. It added that “customer satisfaction” with its activities is “at an all-time high”.
I made those stories up. But if they were real, imagine the outcry about inefficiency, illegality, defamation and human rights. Imagine the rolling heads, the furious shareholders, the painful interview on Watchdog. Now note what actually has happened: a precisely parallel abuse by an agency of the Home Office. And nobody is sorry.
The Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) has erroneously bad-mouthed a large number of innocent citizens. One publicised case is of Emma Budd, who lost her chance of working for a children’s charity when the bureau wrongly identified her as a convicted shoplifter. It admitted that this has happened around 2,700 times but dismisses it as “a tiny proportion” of its work; the Education Secretary speaks sententiously of being on the safe side. It was the Home Office who made the remark about CRB customer satisfaction being at an “all-time high”.
The CRB is an agency of the Home Office run by Capita (former chairman Rod Aldridge, who lent new Labour £1 million). It has been dogged by overspends and delays ever since its chaotic launch four years ago caused schools to go short of staff and cancelled summer playschemes. It still takes six weeks to produce a “disclosure”, which impedes volunteering (a student who applies at the freshers’ fair to help in a youth group will rarely be cleared before term is almost over). At one stage the CRB was sending confidential data — convictions, passport numbers, bank details — to the wrong addresses. Worcester College of Technology claimed to receive personal details on total strangers “on a daily basis”. Procedures, said the CRB huffily, were being tightened.
Only now we find that they’re not tight enough to avoid being misled by “similar names”. And — here’s the significant bit — nobody is sorry. The Home Office feels within its rights to abuse some citizens because others might be wicked. There is a right of challenge, but the procedure is that the “disclosure” goes simultaneously to the individual and the employer. Thus Miss Budd’s job “went out of the window”, and so did her next application. Government agencies merely boast that 25,000 unsuitables were barred last year from positions of trust, which makes it all right to screw up the prospects of 2,700 innocents.
It won’t do. It is not even as if a CRB disclosure is all that valuable as a guarantee of past behaviour: it does not check civil cases. You could be a bully banned from contact with your own children, yet show up clean on their radar. But what bothers me most is that, despite its obvious limitations, officialdom now takes a default position of arrogant conviction that it knows best and that we are not to be trusted. Forget the presumption of innocence: now we are all scumbags until proved otherwise.
This tone of voice grows ever more marked. You catch it in political speeches, health campaigns, education, police warnings, even lavatory doors. The writer Brendan O’Neill reports that male urinals jeer “Relax, no one knows you’re a wife beater” and threaten “ . . . we will track you down”. They also shout, in terms too crude for the breakfast table, that smoking causes impotence. As for ladies’ lavatories, I can confirm how often they snap: “If you smoke, you stink!” and “Don’t share needles”. As for official posters about sexual diseases, I spare you their insulting lavatorial crudity.
Whether these campaigns work is not proven. It may be that their main effect is to convey governmental busyness, and thus distract us from our continuing inability to get a NHS dentist or proper psychiatric services. But their tone chimes exactly with this week’s unrepentant Home Office, blithely scattering insult and contumely to “err on the side of caution”. Caution? This is an organisation that not only mislays foreign parole prisoners but lets sixty inmates a year walk out of Leyhill open prison, including twenty murderers and six rapists. Meanwhile, it keeps little Emma Budd out of a charity job for culpably having the same name as a shoplifter years her senior and from another part of the country. Frankly, the kind of “caution” the Home Office practises is the kind that sends a blindfolded tightrope walker out across Niagara Falls but makes sure he has a clean hanky.
The tone amounts to a national Disrespect Agenda: sanctimonious, scolding, applying standards only to little people. Tessa Jowell’s husband can be thick with Silvio Berlusconi and dodgy fake loans prop up politics, but down in the everyday world cumbersome new “money-laundering” regulations force pensioners to identify themselves three different ways to a bank manager they’ve known for years, and make it illegal for an estate agent to market your house without taking your national insurance number.
John Prescott can with impunity assault people and demand sex in his office, but a harassed teacher who lays a restraining hand on a child’s shoulder risks ruin. The Home Office can mismanage dangerous prisoners, yet roll its eyes up in pious self-justification as it libels the innocent. Health and police posters can berate us as malodorous wife beaters while actual police ignore burglaries and NHS Direct takes four hours to ring back.
We deserve more respect.
Read recent columns by Libby Purves here
