Safer recruitment and regulated activities: a guide for charities and community organisations
11/15/2022
Safer recruitment is an integral part of safeguarding. If your charity, town or parish council or community organisation carries out any kind of work involving children or adults-at-risk, then you will have a safeguarding exposure. You will therefore need to have appropriate arrangements in place to ensure you are practising safer recruitment.
What is safer recruitment?
Safer recruitment is a set of practices designed to ensure your staff and volunteers are suitable to work with vulnerable groups, including children and adults-at-risk.
In order to practise safer recruitment, organisations need to have a clear understanding of legal safeguarding concepts such as ‘regulated activity’, and how and when to initiate certain checks on prospective staff members and volunteers.
In reality, many organisations find aspects of safer recruitment daunting and hard to get to grips with. Our Safeguarding and safer recruitment guide provides guidance on topics such as regulated activity and Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks, (formally known as CRB checks) in order to help organisations better understand their responsibilities.
Regulated activity relating to children and adults at risk
Understanding what is meant by regulated activity and who it applies to is fundamental to practising safer recruitment.
There are specific categories of activity that are ‘regulated’, with different sets of categories applying to children and adults-at-risk. Some individuals may be barred from working with one or both of these vulnerable groups. It is your legal responsibility to ensure you are not engaging in regulated activity anyone who is on a barred list that prevents them from carrying out that regulated activity.
Our guide explains:
- The different categories of regulated activity that apply to children and adults-at-risk
- The difference between activities which are always ‘regulated’ and those which are only regulated in certain circumstances
- How to ensure during the recruitment process that prospective staff members and volunteers are not on the barred lists for either children or adults-at-risk
DBS checks
The Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) helps organisations to make safer recruitment decisions by identifying candidates who may be unsuitable for certain work, especially work which involves children and adults-at-risk. The DBS provides access to criminal record information through its disclosure service for England and Wales. They also partner with AccessNI to provide disclosures for Northern Ireland. Scotland follows a similar process but, all Scottish disclosures are provided via Disclosure Scotland.
There are four levels of DBS check. Our guide will help you to understand:
- What each level of check involves and the kind of information that may be obtained
- The circumstances in which it would be appropriate to apply for each level of check
- Who can apply for disclosure checks
- Alternative ways of obtaining information about foreign applicants in cases where the DBS does not hold any relevant records
Our guide also provides links to some of the legislation and statutory guidance that underpins safer recruitment – for example, the official government guidance explaining the difference between spent and unspent convictions.
Finally, our guide discusses the importance of taking a proportionate approach to vetting prospective employees and volunteers. If your organisation has safeguarding exposures, you will need to ensure you have enough information to make safe recruitment decisions. At the same time, you also have a responsibility not to impinge on your staff and volunteers’ legal right to privacy, for example by seeking a DBS check where it is not appropriate to do so.
By providing straightforward guidance on some of the critical aspects of safer recruitment, our guide can help your organisation to strike the right balance
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