Campaigners are delighted, but my guess is that this is highly dangerous. For a start, how reliable will the information be? The Criminal Records Bureau's track record does not give confidence. In one year, it wrongly labelled 2,700 innocent people as criminals – many of them lost job offers as a result.

A Liverpool grandfather found he had "acquired" a 33-year criminal record, even though he had never broken the law. He was wrongly accused of being a rapist, a thug with a GBH conviction, and a drink driver.

For a parent, the thought of their child being subjected to abuse by a paedophile is calculated to arouse fury, but there is a danger of it developing into hysteria when many people become involved.

The information is supposed to be restricted to one person, but it defies imagination to believe it will not be shared with family and friends.

A few years ago, an angry mob on a northern housing estate laid siege to a house where a paedophile was rumoured to live. It transpired that the homeowner was not a paedophile but a woman paediatrician – mobs are not too knowledgeable about titles.

This type of hysteria has had a catastrophic effect on voluntary work. One survey showed that 48 per cent of adults said fear of being falsely accused of causing harm was a barrier to contact with children and young people. It would also make them less likely to help if they saw a young person in danger or distress.

Another survey revealed that one in five men do not volunteer to work with children because they would have to undertake a criminal records check. Not because they had ever done anything wrong, but they did not trust the authorities.

A children's charity says that CRB checks should be no problem unless you have something to hide. This is rubbish. Many people avoid them not because they have something to hide but because they resent having to fill out forms and find referees for something like a voluntary job of making tea at a church children's holiday club – something she has been doing for 20 years. One man involved in several fields needed five separate CRB checks to cover them all.

There is also the risk of disclosure of a minor offence which had no relevance to working with children. One school governor was informed by the local authority that a new appointee had "a criminal record" and was told the details. The offence was minor and had been committed more than half a lifetime ago, but it was enough to prevent a first-rate volunteer from continuing.

The information was revealed to the school governors and therefore throughout the community. As a result, the man would never again volunteer to assist with any other community activities for the rest of his life, as well as living under a shadow, because "word gets about".

As always, bureaucracy feeds on itself. There are 400 Home Office staff issuing 300,000 disclosures a month at an estimated cost of half a billion pounds. Six million days are spent waiting for the result of CRB checks on volunteers.

It is a miracle that anybody volunteers for anything these days.



WITH their usual financial illiteracy, the unions are calling for a windfall tax to punish the energy companies for their "obscene" profits. It is the same kind of thinking that led Gordon Brown to wreck Britain's pension industry by filching billions from pension funds in a windfall tax.

The latest call is in line with the howl every time petrol prices go up. Completely ignored is the big bonus for the Treasury every time it happens. Why don't we claw back some of the "obscene" taxes levied on oil companies?

Unlike most companies, which pay 28 per cent tax, oil and gas producers pay at least 50 per cent, rising to 75 per cent for profits from older fields. This year the taxman is getting back £16bn, double last year's take. The Treasury has done nothing to earn this money: why don't the unions ask for it back?

The last thing we want to do is to repeat the pensions blunder by stripping energy companies of the funds they need for costly
exploration. Geese and golden eggs come to mind.



HERE is a puzzle. Two men want to come and live in Britain. The first is an Islamist fanatic convicted of terrorist activity in Jordan, who arrives on a forged passport. He was known to have connections with the Hamburg cell of September 11 hijackers. On arrival, he will spend his time spouting hatred against this country while living on benefits.

The other is a Gurkha who lost his hand fighting for Britain against the Japanese and was awarded the VC. He served in the British Army for more than 30 years.

Which one should be granted permission to live here? The Brown Government has no doubt. Keep the Gurkha VC out and let the other one in. Can you think of a more shameful way for a Government to behave?