CRB checks, bureacracy and regeneration

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I have to have another CRB check done. This is so I can sit in a committee room at Bradford City Hall and hear appeals against the Council’s refusal of support for travelling to school. Apparently, Councillors who sit on committees that “discharge any education or social services function” require a CRB check. Here in Bradford the Council’s bureaucracy has decided that this will be an ‘enhanced’ check.

I have no idea at all what all this is for, whether is achieves anything other than feed a system. I have no problem with running background checks on people who are working with children but I’m not doing that, I’m just sitting on a committee and won’t come into contact with any children who aren’t firmly attached (so to speak) to parents, guardians or other responsible adults. And that contact – if we can credit it with such a description – takes place in the company of other panel members, committee clerks, officers of the education authority and other assorted educational flotsam and jetsam. There is precisely zero risk associated with such a circumstance.

I am inclined not to complete the necessary forms and to see what happens – the worst outcome is that they take me off the Education Appeals Panel, which wouldn’t be a great loss on my part! However, the whole exercise does remind me of a lecture given by someone involved in regenerating (of trying to regenerate) Wythenshawe in South Manchester. Given Wythenshawe’s location close to the North West’s biggest employment generator – Manchester Airport – very few residents of the town actually secured work there. On investigation, it turned out that the main reason for this was that records of petty criminality or anti-social behaviour meant most of them failed security checks. As we were told – going straight doesn’t look a great option to these young men!

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