It is finally dawning on many that the plan to vet everybody who comes into contact with children or vulnerable adults is useless. But it's worse than that. A system that treats millions of carers and volunteers as potential abusers is itself a serious abuse of trust.

When the Government declared that it would extend the vetting system after the 2003 Soham murder trial, I protested here that the logical outcome of the vetting fetish could be “to vet bus drivers, sweet shop staff, clowns, librarians and everybody else who ever gets within touching distance of a child”. I didn't realise they would treat my polemic as serious advice. Official estimates of how many adults will be vetted under the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act that comes into force next year have risen from 9.5 million to a mind-boggling 11.3 million. They will have to submit to a criminal records test and register with an online database that effectively vets them for ever.

Now, however, police chiefs have told the Government that many low-paid workers caring for the elderly and vulnerable are from Eastern Europe and Africa and cannot be checked in the same way. Why, some of these uncivilised countries don't even have computerised surveillance systems to keep tabs on their citizens!

It seems as if our children and elderly will never be deemed safe until the UK authorities can vet the entire world. The ever-expanding empire of the vetters is already an absurdity. The rules on who has to register are obscure enough to confuse Kafka. The website of the Manifesto Club, which campaigns against the Act, lists examples of the perverse impact on volunteers, such as the youth golf scheme that told helpers to call the police if parents were late rather than take a child home.

Yet whenever problems are raised, the loudest complaint is always that the vetting net is still not wide or tight enough. The assumption is that anybody coming into contact with “vulnerable groups” must be treated as suspect. This abuse of trust can only institutionalise suspicion between children and adults, the elderly and carers.

Perhaps there is a solution to satisfy the vetting fetishists. If thousands of foreigners caring for our elderly can't be checked to their satisfaction, why not sack the lot and close down the homes? That will keep the vulnerable away from the great unvetted. And while they're at it, why not cut off contact between our children and unvetted adults? Sure, leaving the elderly to fend for themselves and locking kids away might have some drawbacks. But according to the law of the vetter, we're always better safe than sorry.

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