The youth theatre club run by Linda Chadwick is so popular that children queue up to perform and parents regularly help out with productions. Yet the group, in Alcester, Warwickshire, may have to close because of regulations being introduced for anyone working or volunteering with children or vulnerable people.

Like thousands of others, Chadwick, 58, fears that the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) will make her life impossible. She contacted it to find out whether the 30-odd adults who help with the plays — making sets, sewing costumes and chaperoning children — would have to register. The answer was yes.

“The ISA told me that anybody who is directly responsible for the welfare or safety of the children or who acts as chaperones has to be registered. So that means virtually everybody,” she said.

“Even if we think some people might not need to be registered, we are a small group on a very low budget. There’s going to be a £5,000 fine if someone who should have been registered is not — and we’re not able to pay that. So we may have to register everyone just to cover ourselves.”

Chadwick worries that the paperwork, expense and sheer mistrust implicit in the scheme will deter some of her volunteers.

“People won’t want to feel they are being treated like criminals. If there are hoops to jump through before they join, clubs like this will close and then there will be more children at a loose end.”

Lara Gringel, a German au pair working for a family near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire also sees little merit in the scheme. She was hired through an agency, so she would come within the scheme’s ambit.

“This is terrible. Au pairs don’t earn a lot so it is expensive,” said Lara, from Vaale, in northern Germany. The ISA would check her background only in the UK, not in Germany. “What use is that?” she asked. “I have only been here on holiday for two weeks when I was still at school. It’s silly. There is nothing to check.”

Sandra Landau, chairman of the British Au Pair Agencies Association, said au pairs would turn to foreign agencies or internet sites to avoid the need to register. “Then they may not know the family they are going to stay with and the family don’t know them. It is a recipe for disaster.”

In the Cambridgeshire village of Linton, Peter Stutz, a retired financial adviser, also has concerns. He runs a bridge club where some players are elderly. “I regularly take them to another bridge club in a nearby village,” he said. “The ISA said if I take vulnerable people to a club or run it more than three times a month, even on a voluntary basis, I will have to register.”

He is tempted to rebel. “I think I will take my chances and say ‘stuff them’. It is ridiculous. The law has gone berserk. This is an idea taken to its illogical extreme.”

The vetting system being introduced by the ISA is both huge and confusing. An estimated 11.3m people who have contact with children or vulnerable adults will have to be screened and registered — almost a quarter of UK adults.

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