With reference to your feature on the Criminal Records Bureau, 'Gridlock', (25 July), who is really to blame for the length of time taken for a CRB check to be completed? Excuses about incorrectly-filled forms having to be returned are pathetic when you consider that when social services were doing the checks a similar form was used and they only took up to eight weeks to complete the checks, compared with nine months now. Did the so-called 'experts' think that centralisation in the south would be cheaper than local area workers being used? (Now, of course, the forms are being sent to India!) If Ofsted threatens to close down a private provider for having workers who are not police-checked (because of CRB incompetence) in unsupervised charge of children, then who is responsible for finding alternative childcare for those working parents who may lose their own job as a result? Is Ofsted not morally (or even legally) obliged to find alternative childcare, as I believe social services were when they were 'in charge'?
With reference to your feature on the Criminal Records Bureau, 'Gridlock', (25 July), who is really to blame for the length of time taken for a CRB check to be completed? Excuses about incorrectly-filled forms having to be returned are pathetic when you consider that when social services were doing the checks a similar form was used and they only took up to eight weeks to complete the checks, compared with nine months now. Did the so-called 'experts' think that centralisation in the south would be cheaper than local area workers being used? (Now, of course, the forms are being sent to India!)
If Ofsted threatens to close down a private provider for having workers who are not police-checked (because of CRB incompetence) in unsupervised charge of children, then who is responsible for finding alternative childcare for those working parents who may lose their own job as a result? Is Ofsted not morally (or even legally) obliged to find alternative childcare, as I believe social services were when they were 'in charge'?
Who pays the bills for the extra staff that a nursery owner would have to employ to cover the supervision of members of staff who have not yet received their police checks? Non-maintained nurseries are only able to pay out salaries that come in as fees, and to force them to pay extra salaries could bring about redundancies and an increase in the unemployment statistics.
Can those nurseries that are unable to open through not having validated workers sue CRB (or Ofsted) for loss of earnings if they have to close down through no fault of their own? Ofsted is threatening socially responsible small businesses with closure, when it and the CRB are the only ones who can provide the required paperwork and are taking up to nine months to do.
May I request that Ofsted places an amnesty on nurseries waiting for police checks to arrive for staff until such time as Ofsted and CRB have actually got their act together and are working properly and efficiently and correctly providing the checks and inspections that they demand from nurseries?
David Scales (husband of a stressed nursery owner), Carlisle, Cumbria
