The sex offenders register should be made public
The Independent, 16 January 2006
By Heather Brooke

After a week of sustained pressure, ministers have finally admitted that politicians may not be the best authority for deciding inclusion on the List 99 register of those banned from working in education. They concede that an outside body should make such decisions. I have just the thing and it won’t cost a penny. The outside body is already in existence – it is the general public.

Revelations that Ruth Kelly’s department cleared the Norfolk PE teacher Paul Reeve and William Gibson, 59, to work as teachers even though they were on the sex offender registry has once again laid bare the inadequacies of criminal records checks. What is most frightening is that Ms Kelly cannot provide an account of how many known sex offenders are working in schools. This is because the system, like so much of current policy, is chaotic, arbitrary and controlled by the patronage of politicians.

Firstly, there is the chaos of the register itself. Individual police forces maintain and feed information into the main sex offenders’ registry, while List 99 is a blacklist, drawn up by politicians at the Department for Education and Skills. Ms Kelly revealed last week that there are currently seven such blacklists barring people from working with children and vulnerable adults. Surely these lists would be more effective (both in terms of cost and operational effectiveness) if they were unified. If the lists were public then such needless duplication and cost-wasting would have been exposed years ago.

Keeping the lists secret from the public makes them less effective in other ways. The public are prevented from having a rational and informed discussion on the structure and composition of the sex offender register because we have no way of knowing who is on the list or why. Secrecy has created a register that has no consistency and is open to abuse by those who control the list, namely the police and politicians.

Reeve was put on the sex offender register after police cautioned him for accessing child pornography over the Internet. Gibson had a relationship with a 15-year-old pupil in 1980 and as a result was convicted of indecent assault of a minor. Many people, such as Reeves, are on the list even though they have not been charged or found guilty of any crime. Should this be so? It’s true that sexual crimes are difficult to prosecute, evidenced by the fact that Soham murderer Ian Huntley did not have criminal convictions although police were aware he was a danger to young girls. But this points out the desperate need to reform the criminal justice system in favour of the victims of sexual crime, not an opportunity to blacklist people who are innocent in law. Currently, we have no idea what sort of information leads to being placed on the sex offender register.
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