Last winter a father I know went to collect his 12-year-old son from an evening at a youth club in a neighbouring village. It was dark and it was raining. There was only one other child left at the club — another 12-year-old whose mother had rung to say that she was delayed at work and couldn’t pick him up. My friend, who knew the family, offered to take him home.

The female youth worker was adamant. That was not allowed. No written permission had been given, so regulations forbade it. Nor could she drive the boy home, even though she, too, lived in the village; she wasn’t permitted, under child protection rules, to have an unaccompanied minor in her car. That left the boy with one option. He walked 1Å miles home, in the dark, along an unlit country road. He might have been hit by a car, or even abducted by a stranger; he certainly arrived back wet, bewildered and a little scared. That didn’t matter. All the rules had been followed, and whether a child was more or less safe as a result was beside the point.

This is the lunatic universe that we are creating in our attempts to use regulation and legislation to make society safer. And the situation is about to get a great deal worse.

In the past three weeks a new and powerful organisation has started operating in Britain. Created as a response to the outcry over the Soham murders, its aim is to protect the vulnerable, obstruct the wicked and give us greater confidence in the trustworthiness of others. Instead it will make us increasingly suspicious of people, and anxious about how our own behaviour might be interpreted. It will kill off millions of the spontaneous acts of help and friendship that bind us to other people.

Worst of all, it marks the most fundamental change in the relationship of people to the state. If we do anything that brings us into regular, organised contact with other people’s children, or with vulnerable adults, we cannot do so without a licence.

We will have to apply for clearance to the Independent Safeguarding Authority, which will treat us all as suspects until our innocence has been proven. It will use “soft intelligence”, including evidence from work, the police or social services, along with rumours and accusations from any source, to decide whether we can be trusted. Having any organised contact with these two vulnerable groups without ISA approval will, from next year, be a criminal offence.

Most of us have no idea how far the tentacles of the ISA are going to spread. At least 11m people, a quarter of the adult population, will be required to apply to it. But its definitions of “regular”, “organised” and “vulnerable” are so broad that it is going to criminalise a huge range of normal behaviour.

The ISA defines regular as any activity that happens more than once a month, and “organised activity” includes any training, advice, care or transport. Old people being driven to tea parties; mothers who regularly look after one another’s children; fathers who are on a rota to give their sons’ friends lifts to cricket matches; all these could be caught by the regulations.

The definitions of vulnerable adult are just as ludicrous. They include anyone receiving any form of healthcare, anyone detained in custody or on probation, any nursing or expectant mother in accommodation — whatever that means — and anyone who is receiving “any service or activity specifically for persons due to age, or disability, or prescribed physical or mental problem”.

This sounds like a monster, and it is. But anyone who imagines that its provisions are too ridiculous to be enforced is in for a shock. A few weeks ago there was an outcry when the question of parents giving lifts came up. Ed Balls, the children’s secretary, wanted to defuse the issue swiftly, and asked Sir Roger Singleton, the ISA chairman, to look again at the rules. It was widely assumed that they would be rethought. Singleton has yet to report, but last week he was on the Today programme and was asked how far he thought the work of the ISA might spread.

Singleton didn’t pull back. He said that rotas for driving children to activities were likely to remain within the scheme. “In that context, it is reasonable to expect of the person who is doing that driving that there’s no known reason why he shouldn’t work with children.” Indeed, he took the view that ISA registration would and should spread far beyond the people who would be obliged to seek it.

It is Singleton’s use of the word “reasonable” that chills the blood. He thinks it reasonable that adults who know one another should no longer be free to decide who should and shouldn’t be entrusted with their children. Instead of trusting the instincts that humans have evolved over millennia to make decisions about one another, the state is telling us that it’s better to have 200 quangocrats in Darlington sifting through documents on a computer screen and making the decisions for us.

Everything about this approach to the question of how to make society safer is wrong. The problem isn’t that most people are potential abusers of children or adults; it’s that a tiny and determined minority are. Vetting millions of people is not only horribly intrusive; it’s a waste of time. It will create a false sense of security. Even if all the rumours and accusations the ISA received were accurate, and even if it got a remarkable 99% of decisions right, that would still mean that hundreds of abusers would be cleared, and more than a hundred thousand innocent people would lose their jobs or their reputations by being ISA-barred.

More profoundly, this insistence on the importance of distrust is eating away at our society. One in three men claim to have been deterred from volunteering, and the Brownies cannot find enough Brown Owls. A churchwarden in Hertfordshire told me all the spontaneous activities his church used to organise, such as picnics on a sunny Sunday, had had to stop because nothing could be done unless officially signed for far in advance. The summer play scheme on the green, with rounders and parachute games and art, went when the parents who manned it were asked to have Criminal Records Bureau checks. Even though everyone in the village knew everyone else, they weren’t allowed to act on that trust. He described parents and church workers as paralysed by the fear of doing something wrong. “We’re organising out the idea of community,” he said.

Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, the executive director of Community Service Volunteers, an organisation with almost 230,000 people a year taking part in it, says that nobody is counting the cost as people decide to withdraw altogether from the legal and bureaucratic nightmare that helping others has become. In Cornwall, volunteer flower arrangers at a hospital chapel were informed that they could not continue unless they took CRB checks. Instead they left. Football clubs in deprived areas are, Hoodless says, becoming impossible for disadvantaged children to join. They don’t have parents with cars to get them to training or fixtures, and already the better-off parents are refusing to give lifts in case they are accused of illegal behaviour or assault. The CSV’s own procedures for scrutinising volunteers have worked without any serious problems for almost 50 years, but that means nothing now.

Hoodless warns that, far from society being improved, millions of children are going to be even more neglected because of the spread of these checks.

There is only one thing to be done in the face of this insanity, which is for us to campaign and protest. But we have to do so on the understanding that the government has created this nightmare because we, the public and the media, expect it to eradicate risk. It cannot be done, and the price we are paying as we try to do so is far too high.

jennirussell01@googlemail.com

Martin Ivens is away

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