It turns out that around 10% of those identified by Criminal Records Bureau as criminals when undergoing background checks before taking up jobs involving children or vulnerable adults weren't actually criminals. That's around 2,700 people who presumably didn't get jobs they were perfectly suitable for because the Home Office can't keep accurate records. Given the problem they're having with false positives, you have to wonder whether they are - for all their 'we are erring on the side of caution' shtick attempts to justify smearing people with the potential child molester brush - having a similar one with false negatives. And this is the lot we're supposed to trust to deal with, at great expense one might add, ID cards. All systems contain the potential for error, and some of that has to be lived with, because the costs of not doing so are so great: after all, there are other jobs, whereas abuse not only cannot be undone but is a rather more serious harm than short-term unemployment. But 10% strikes me as very high, incompetently so.
Update, 23/05/06: Jarndyce makes explicit the connection I was particularly interested in here.
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But is it 10%? There's something odd about those figures - it's unclear whether they're saying that there were 25,000 false positives in the last year or that there have been 25,000 since the system began. Either way, their refusal to apologise is pretty disgusting.
Actually, it doesn't look like it's over the past year: I think it's probably over the lifetime of the agency, in which case it's not 10%. But from the figures given, it's impossible to actually tell.
I'd be wary of assuming they might have a similar rate of false negatives. I'd probably rather the system was designed to err on the side of caution - i.e. tend to false positives rather than false negatives.
So you don't believe the 0.03% figure given by the government?
It's not that I don't believe that they have a 0.03% rate of confirmed false positives out of all enquiries, it's that I don't know what the rate is out of all positives, because they only give the number of positives over the past year.
As for the possibility of false negatives, who can say? Since the defence they're running is 'better safe than sorry', I assume the system is set up to be incredibly cautious, but that might just be the defence they're running. Say false negatives are generated at half the rate that false positives are: that's still over a thousand people who apparently shouldn't have been approved who were.
I should strike a note of caution here, though: the woman who is referred to in the BBC article was not given a job with children because it was mistakenly reported she had a conviction for shop-lifting. Shop-lifting, whilst obviously criminal, doesn't seem to me to be criminal in a way that disqualifies you from working with children.
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