Clarifying the Home Office's policy on vetting and barring
On 14th May 2009, Simon Morrison, Head of Communications for the Vetting and Barring Scheme at the Home Office, came to Housing Justice to clarify some policy points with us
Here is a transcript of what Simon Morrison stated:
I’ll try and summarise. If a night shelter is set up just to provide a bed, washing facilities, food or similar for people who are homeless, then the fact that they are homeless does not render them vulnerable on its own right.
As long as your shelter is not set up specifically to cater for homeless drug users or homeless alcoholics or homeless people with mental health problems – then even if some of those people are residents or attend the shelter - it doesn’t mean that your shelter itself is a provider for people with vulnerable conditions. So your volunteers would not have to be registered.
If your volunteers are carrying out kinds of activities which one would presume happen in a shelter – helping people find a bed, clean clothes, handing out food, even if they’re giving them literature to read or similar – then again, because they’re not providing a service to an individual as a result of a vulnerability they have, they wouldn’t need to be registered.
If you have a shelter where you may have an outreach worker or similar who is providing advice or guidance to a vulnerable individual, then they would have to be registered but the other people in the shelter wouldn’t.
Nor would it be your responsibility as the church group or group of churches providing that shelter to ensure that the outreach worker was registered, as long as they weren’t provided for directly by you and that was the only thing they were doing.
If it’s someone who comes, let’s say from a drugs charity and says ‘Can I come talk to some of your residents?’ then it would be the drugs charity’s responsibility? the people who allow that counselling to occur to ensure that their worker was registered not to use the people who organise the shelter that is not set up specifically for people with a vulnerability.
Simon Morrison also stated,
There will be more information coming out. There’s always the option to contact us as well. If you have people who are saying ‘Are you sure?’ there are 2 things:
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There’s a contact us function on our website, where people cab put any question they want in there.
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There’s a local telephone number. So any call you make is just like making a local call 0300 123 1111 and there is a team of operators based in Bristol who can give advice on all aspects of the scheme as well.