The national roll-out of the Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme was announced by the Home Secretary this morning after a year-long pilot programme was hailed as a success.

 

Dubbed ‘Sarah’s Law’ after a public campaign for the legislation was mounted in the wake of the killing of Sarah Payne by a convicted sex offender, the scheme allows members of the public to check if individuals have a history of child sex offences.

 

The scheme, according to the Home Office, has “already protected more than 60 children from abuse during its pilot”. But what exactly does this statistic mean?

 

The figure is drawn from an evaluation report published in March of this year which uses data collected from the four police forces piloting the programme (Warwickshire, Hampshire, Cleveland and Cambridgeshire) to illustrate their experiences of the scheme.

 

According to the report, from 585 enquiries and 315 applications for disclosure of information made under the pilot scheme, there were 75 ‘outcomes’ where action was taken.

 

However these ‘outcomes’ do not all relate to the original remit of the disclosure scheme, which was to provide information on child sex offenders and protection to those at risk from their actions.

 

Of the 75 disclosures made, only 21 caused information to be released or action to be taken with regard to a registered child sex offender.

 

According to a Home Office spokesperson, such actions range from police interaction with a child’s guardians to court orders prohibiting offenders from making contact with minors.

 

A further 11 disclosures were made regarding ‘non-pilot’ matters. These were instances where background checks did not reveal any history of child sex offences by an individual, but did unearth other information which might place a child at risk, such as a history of violent offences.

 

However the bulk of the original figure of 60 quoted by the Home Office is accounted for by the 43 ‘other safeguarding actions’ registered as being taken by the participating police authorities. These represent actions taken outside of the scheme in response to disclosure requests.

 

According to the Home Office report, these actions include 37 referrals made by the police to Children’s Social Care and 15 strategy meetings held internally by the forces concerned. Crucially, however, these outcomes did not necessarily involve either the applicant or the subject of the original disclosure request. The report merely notes that the end results for such cases were “not represented in the management information supplied by forces”.

 

So whilst it is clear from the available information that the Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme has had an impact on over 60 cases, the impact this has had on children remains much more difficult to quantify.