Vetting blunders label 12,000 innocent people as paedophiles, violent thugs and thieves



Mistaken identity: The CRB has labelled more than 12,200 innocent people as paedophiles and thieves (picture posed by model)

More than 12,200 innocent people have been branded criminals by bungling police and Government officials, it has been revealed.

The incorrect records showing them to be paedophiles, violent thugs or other convicts were disclosed to schools, hospitals, nurseries and voluntary groups by the Criminal Records Bureau.

The extent of the misreporting is four times worse than officials had suggested.

Those wrongly accused by the CRB face having their careers blighted. They also have to go through an appeals process to clear their names.

By the time that has finished, they may have been stigmatised and their chance of obtaining a job or training post dashed - disclosures are sent to the potential employee and the applicant on the same day.

The CRB's annual report indicates that only 680 inaccurate disclosures were made last year - fewer than two each day.

But figures seen by the Daily Mail reveal there were 2,785 last year.

That is almost eight trainee teachers, nurses or childminders waking up each day to find a letter on their doormat wrongly branding them an offender.

Since 2003-2004, more than 12,200 have been wrongly stigmatised as criminals. They contested their cases, and were proved to be right.

Figures obtained by Tory MP Mike Penning show that, in some years, virtually every contested disclosure was found to be inaccurate.

In 2005-2006, 2,669 disputes were upheld, out of 2,675 that were contested.

The CRB, an arm of the Home Office, was set up in 2002 to vet those working with children or vulnerable people.

It carries out checks on criminal convictions, cautions and reprimands. An enhanced check also examines any other 'relevant and proportionate' information held by police forces.

The CRB had been effectively covering up the scale of the problem by only making public those mistakes for which its staff were personally responsible.

It had not been releasing details of disclosures containing inaccuracies supplied to the CRB by other public bodies - most notably the police - then subsequently disclosed in the agency's name.

Mistakes have included people having convictions wrongly attributed to their name because of a mistake by staff entering information into the Police National Computer.

'Soft intelligence' - such as the never-proved suspicion that a person has been linked to a crime - has also been inaccurately or wrongly disclosed.

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said: 'The increase in the number of incorrect disclosures is disturbing. These are mistakes that risk ruining people's lives.'

Phil Booth, of the NO2ID privacy campaign, said: 'One mistake in the system and your whole life can go down the pan. You are officially tagged a criminal when you have done nothing wrong.'

The number of vetting checks is being expanded. From next autumn, more than 11 million adults - one in four of the adult population in England - will have to be vetted and registered on the Independent Safeguarding Authority's database.

They will be forced to pay £64 each for background checking.

A CRB spokesman said: 'In the last four years, CRB checks have prevented 80,000 unsuitable people from working with vulnerable groups.

'Of around 3.3million checks conducted by the CRB last year, over 99.91 per cent were issued correctly.

'While any disputes are clearly regrettable, the percentage of disputes upheld as a total of the number of disclosures issued has fallen for the last three years.'