Social Network for RSA Fellows

SimpleCRB - Brilliant project needs partner

Last week I met with Anna Pearson who has been developing a number of marvellous projects to encourage volunteering. One these is SimpleCRB which, as the name suggests, aims to reduced the hassle, cost and time of current CRB. The project is at system build stage and the project is looking for a partner (local authority, university, voluntary organisation) who do an excess 3,000 per annum to move this valuable project forward. More detail below.... please contact me (brittons100@btinternet.com) or Anna (anna@spotsoftime.org.uk).

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2011 is probably going to be a year when we're all a bit short of money and looking to trim the edges off our budgets and for local authorities and community organisations we already know the pain is going to be pretty severe. So its an ideal time for an disruptive idea to come along with the intention of saving the public and voluntary sector millions of pounds and millions of man hours - a little ray of light perhaps?

SimpleCRB is a new service that is currently in development and which will provide cheaper, quicker and more effective Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks on a 'not for profit' basis to the public and voluntary sector. The guiding philosophy is twofold - firstly that these sectors shouldn't be paying through the nose for checks they are legally required to carry out to protect the children and vulnerable adults they work with, and secondly, that these sectors should get the very best service.

The very best service in this case means taking the checks online thereby the cutting direct costs, administrative burden, errors and also delay (a check submitted online will be 5-7 days faster than one done on paper). But online checks aren't actually new, the Criminal Records Bureau rolled out what it calls e-bulk last year, its just that so far only the largest CRB checking companies have been given the permission to use ebulk - these companies are providing access to others either but at a cost.

As the roll-out of ebulk continues organisations that do more than 3,000 CRB checks a year can now apply to get access e-bulk. Sounds good - but in fact they will have to pay through the nose for technical platforms to allow them to actually submit applications. The approach also risks each local authority and major charity paying individually for the same technology - and of course there remains scant access for smaller organisations. So here is the disruptive part of SimpleCRB - to prevent build just ONE platorm and ensure that ANYONE in the not-for-profit world, can use it on a not-for-profit basis.

But at the moment SimpleCRB can only move forward if it finds a partner organisation to work with which does 3,000 CRB checks a year in order to get a connection with the online CRB systemsm. A partner doing 3,000 checks per year is this project's equivalent of Willy Wonka's golden ticket but without the tour of the chocolate factory. Know an organisation that fits the bill?

Comment by Ruth Elizabeth Willis on February 1, 2011 at 13:16: Tessy, there is a Linked In group who are involved in CRB checked related jobs and also a web site, you could try contacting them to see if they have any leads? There is a growth market in the Private Care Sector and they all need people with CRB checks, another route might be County Councils who run schools? Ruth

Comment by Martin Wilson on February 1, 2011 at 13:46: this looks like an excellent idea. Often volunteering in a practical way is thwarted by administration and risk management. Anything that makes it quicker and more efficient would be superb...M

Comment by Tessy Britton on February 1, 2011 at 16:25: Thanks very much Ruth and Martin, and others who have sent direct messages with suggestions and contacts.... much appreciated!

Comment by Dominic Pinto on February 7, 2011 at 8:45: Other work matters have been pressing - daytime and evening meetings - so I've only been able to think about this over the last couple of days.

A few points:

1 The whole of the CRB system has been a huge diversion of resources - around half a billion in cash terms it is estimated - and it's not so much the costs (whether direct fees, or our own time) as the delays - up to six months I gather - and the singularly useless assurance it provides. One egregious example was our senior youth worker whose period of work in Australia was thrown up as a negative signal as a gap, and it took months to overcome that particular hurdle. Projects working in the area of bringing former offenders back into mainstream life could not employ former offenders, or allow them to volunteer, because of negative CRB checks.

2 An over-reliance on systems, especially centralised ones run by a bureaucracy, provides a false assurance that if the checks are passed that means someone is OK. It doesn't, and shouldn't, override the need to know who people first, know your prospective employees as far as it's possible, know your volunteers. That means checking references properly, employment record if that's relevant, school and college claimed qualifications, and supervising and managing properly.

3 The extension of this database state approach is still going ahead, in one way or another, since even with the announced roll back of the octopus of the Vetting and Barring Scheme there will still be millions to be prospectively to be checked and records maintained. It is that which is likely to deter even more people, from especially volunteering. Peter Hain claimed on Any Questions that the CRB system would have prevented Soham. There's scant evidence that anything would have prevented that other than proper and sensitive