Whisper it quietly, Jimmy Saville was a volunteer

We are all too aware of the recent celebrity child abuse scandals in the UK, in particular the appalling case of Jimmy Saville. Saville abused hundreds of people over many years with many a blind eye being turned to his behaviour by the media, police, regulators and other official bodies.

The world of volunteer management has escaped lightly. Few have sought to draw the connection between Saville’s behaviour and his status as a volunteer. It has had passing mention in the media coverage but scrutiny of volunteering has been scant.

Just one instance has come across my radar, an article in The Guardian at the end of February 2015, which highlights the Lampard Review of the NHS in regard to Saville and in particular the concerns about volunteer management in the NHS.

The article notes that Lampard highlights four key issues.

First, that the risk to patients of being abused could increase as more volunteers are brought in to work in an increasingly cash-strapped health service.

“They [volunteers] undertake a much wider variety of roles and often have much closer contact with patients than in the past.”

Second, that volunteer management isn’t taken seriously enough at a senior level within the NHS.

“Many NHS volunteer programmes are not managed and overseen at a senior level and do not have the management resources they need.”

Third, the need for effective screening of volunteers, with Lampard reportedly calling on the NHS to amend regulations to make sure staff and volunteers were subjected to criminal records checks every three years.

Finally, The Guardian says that: 

“Lampard also raised concerns about the lack of any cohesive structure within NHS hospitals for managing visits by celebrities, important fundraisers and donors despite the publicity around Savile’s decades of abuse.”

These are not four discrete issues, they are inter-related, so let me try and unpick them a bit.

To start with, an increase in volunteers within any organisation does not automatically increase risk. What does often increase the risk is poorly thought out reasons and strategy for volunteer involvement (often a consequence of a lack of strategic management engagement in the volunteer programme) and ineffective screening, often borne out of poorly resourced volunteer management structures.

Good volunteer programmes don’t just take anyone off the street and put them in unsupervised contact with vulnerable people. We should not assume that just because volunteers are unpaid they are incompetent or inherently a risky proposition. But good programmes need resourcing if they are to do their job properly and they need to be properly integrated into the whole organisation. This requires CEOs, boards and the like to properly understand and engage with volunteering as a strategic priority, not just say how essential volunteers are as they issue warmly worded statements in Volunteers’ Week.

This is perhaps the most fundamental issue Lampard highlights and one that needs action not just within the NHS but in many Volunteer Involving Organisations across all sectors, including the Voluntary and Community Sector. 

The point made by Lampard about celebrities and major donors not being properly supervised and their involvement not properly structured in the NHS is a great example. 

Throughout my career in the voluntary sector I have come across fundraisers, CEOs and senior managers who dismiss out of hand any suggestion that good volunteer management practices should be applied to the involvement of high profile supporters, despite their status as volunteers. Why? Because often they see volunteer management as concerned with the nice to haves, the little old ladies making the tea, and not with the important work of more serious concerns like celebrity endorsement of the cause. 

The Jimmy Saville situation highlights the stupidity of this and the irresponsible thinking behind it. To continue such a train of thought borders on the negligent. Yet still that line is seen as acceptable in fundraising departments and sector senior teams. It is surely time for this to be challenged!

As a quick aside, for some insightful and intelligent thinking on the issues of celebrities as volunteers I commend you to Eileen Hammond’s excellent book for the Directory of Social Change, “Patrons, Presidents and Personalities”.

So far I have highlighted issues that I think the Lampard review gets right. Senior management needs to take seriously the strategic involvement of volunteers, resource it properly and organisations need to stop seeing celebrity volunteers as having a protected, special status that allows them to operate outside of existing good practice.

I want to conclude with one aspect I think Lampard gets wrong, calling for the Department of Health to change regulations so staff and volunteers undergo DBS checks every three years. I’m not going to go into huge detail here because I’ve blogged on this previously. My concern is that the sole focus on DBS checks will not result in better safety for NHS patients who have volunteers assigned to them. Jimmy Saville would have always passed a DBS check because ehe was never caught. Robust screening goes way beyond a criminal record check and so should this recommendation from Lampard.

Returning to where I started, the scandal of Jimmy Saville and others being allowed to abuse people for so long behind the screen of their celebrity status is rightly abhorrent to us all. That it was allowed to continue for so long is deplorable. Yet thank goodness volunteer management has not been thrust to the fore of these stories. I fear the field would have been exposed for its failings, mainly a consequence not of volunteer managers themselves but of the layers of management in Volunteer Involving Organisations across all sectors who fail to see volunteering as a strategic priority. 

Let’s hope it doesn't take another scandal like Saville for that situation to change and volunteer involvement to be taken seriously by those who should know better.

The trouble with criminal record checks

It is the issue that simply won't go away.  Whenever volunteering gets mentioned it seems three little letters won't be far away.  They are there in media coverage and an ever present source of questions whenever I run workshops, training sessions and sit on conference panel discussions.

I give you CRB, or criminal record checks.  That's what they get called in England although they have different names in different parts of the UK and indeed other countries around the world.

Early on in my volunteer management career I worked for Barnardo's, one of the oldest and biggest UK charities working with vulnerable children and young people.  At the time only a small number of organisations had access to criminal record checks so the vast majority of volunteer involving organisations - without access to police checks as we called them then - applied a number of screening techniques in order to manage the risk to their clients from involving 'unsuitable' volunteers.

Within the context of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions Order 1975) these included:

Application forms - they paid close attention to the information prospective volunteer supplied, looking for inconsistencies, gaps in employment records etc..

References - considerable care was taken to secure at least two good quality references.  Usually this involved one professional reference and one personal reference, the evidence from programmes like Big Brothers and Sisters in the USA suggesting that personal referees were much more likely to reveal details of someone's past that might prevent them from volunteering then previous litigation-fearful employers.

Canadian screening expert Linda Graff often argues that references are a hugely under-used tool in screening and her book "Beyond Police Checks" is still an essential read in the field of volunteer screening and is highly recommended.

Interviews - ideally done by two people, interviews (whether you call them that or not) we an essential  screening tool.

Supervision - ongoing regular supervision to check on the volunteer, what they are doing, what they are struggling with, what support they need etc. and to address issues that arise, whether formally or informally.

Appraisals - whether annually or more frequent, formal check points in addition to ongoing supervision were important to review the volunteers' place and role within the organisation and to flag issues if they have arisen since the last meeting.

User and volunteer feedback - looking for the views and opinions of service users and other volunteers, both on the whole programme and on the work of other volunteers.  This was/is formally enshrined by some in whistle-blower policies.

Above all organisations - whether they had access to police checks or not - employed a suite of tools to screen people wanting to volunteer with vulnerable clients.  They didn't do one thing, they followed a screening process, an ongoing process that didn't stop when recruitment finished.  Critically they spent time considering all these tools in the round to look for clues as to somebody not being a suitable volunteer.

In training I often quote an example of the importance of screening being a process and one where the different elements inter-relate and so need checking against each other (names have been changed to protect the possibly guilty).

I was once cross checking the police check application and volunteer application forms of a potential volunteer at Barnardo's.  All looked good at first glance.  Upon closer inspection, however, I noticed that on one form the surname was Brown and on the other Browne.  The dates of birth were also out by a day.  We followed up with the person concerned and heard nothing more from them.  Now, they might have been totally innocent and never responded because they'd changed their minds about volunteering.  But, what if?  What if they had been deliberately trying to sneak through the system with misinformation, hoping nobody would spot it?  Without that close attention to detail cross-referencing the two forms we might never have spotted a potential risk to our clients.

So that's how things used to be.

Then, in 1997, the Police Act came into force.  Part five of the act provided the legislative basis for the Criminal Records Bureau to be formed and the introduction of CRB checks to a much wider range of organisations.  The CRB set out guidance and code of practice on checking volunteers that explained who could be checked and at what level.  These documents were seen as important both to ensure that checking was only done where appropriate and necessary and to set it within a proper context of the wider screening systems organisations should employ.

Yet despite this guidance, some organisations still seem to conduct checks on everyone who volunteers, not just those who should be checked because of their access to vulnerable people.  See this excellent blog from Jamie Ward-Smith on i-volunteer that sums up many people's experience with CRB checks.

Many organisations  appear to behave as if a clearance from the CRB is a guarantee that volunteers pose no risk to clients.  Many organisations seemingly fail to properly employ a wide range of screening techniques and seek to cross reference the information prospective volunteers supply in order to spot irregularities and possible causes for concern.

Instead we have a narrative around and a practice focus on volunteer screening that is fixated with CRB checks, almost always to the exclusion of any other screening method.  Don't get me wrong, CRB checks can be an important screening tool and we should have access to them, but their value is only realised if they are used as part of a comprehensive screening process, not if they are the screening process.

Yes there are organisations out there doing great work screening volunteers well and effectively safeguarding vulnerable people.  Sadly however, the overall picture of the last fifteen years appears to be one of more and more reliance on CRB checks.  Consequently I fear we've lost many of the skills and subtle understanding needed to properly safeguard vulnerable people as we've become more reliant on a single check that is out of date as soon as it is conducted.

In short, the trouble with CRB checks is that: we have become worryingly reliant upon them; we gain a false sense of safety by conducting them; and consequently we are less safe because of them.

What do you think?

Do you agree with me?

Have you got tips or stories to share on effective volunteer screening that goes beyond CRB?

Whilst the context of this post on CRB checks is very much my experiences in England I hope those of you from other countries will see your own parallels with the issues I raise.

Please use the comments facility below to share your own thoughts or experiences of criminal record checking, whether you agree with me or not.