The places with the very worst safeguarding culture will be entirely unaffected by the government’s new “mandatory reporting” law. This is why.

There’s no criminal sanction for non-reporting.

The government makes a lot of the fact that someone failing to report might be referred to the DBS. That referral is done by the non-reporter’s own employer, and only if they sack the person first.

But at the worst settings, they are more likely to reward a nonreporter than sack them. If they don’t sack them, they don’t have to make a DBS referral. Simples!

So the DBS mechanism is entirely ineffective in the places with the worst safeguarding culture.

Preventing or deterring a person from complying with duty to report suspected child sex offence

Then there is the offence of “Preventing or deterring a person from complying with duty to report suspected child sex offence”. It has a huge loophole. It remains perfectly legal to persuade someone to delay reporting child sex abuse. there is no limit to the duration of the delay.

But even without that loophole, the offence will have little effect. In the John Smyth case, nobody was told to shut up about Smyth’s abuses. Nobody’s job was threatened if they went to the police about Smyth.

Instead there was a common unspoken consensus, reaching all the way up to Justin Welby, that keeping quiet about it all was the right thing to do. There was no specific instance of preventing someone that could be used as evidence for a prosecution.

IICSA identified quite a few places with that kind of unspoken consensus. These places, which have the worst safeguarding culture, are therefore safe from any risk of prosecution for “preventing or deterring” a report.

And the government has nothing else to offer. This is a recipe for the next Savile or Smyth.

There is a simple fix

All this is really simple to fix, if the government wants to. An effective mandatory law needs three things.

  1. A criminal sanction directly for non-reporting
  2. For the reporting duty include any reasonable grounds for suspecting abuse.
  3. Protection from retaliation for mandated reporters acting in good faith.

There is already a Private Member’s Bill before Parliament that does all this, the Regulated and Other Activities (Mandatory Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse) Bill. The government could adopt it wholesale tomorrow.