Control freaks who wouldn't let your child go to school

The teacher vetting fiasco beggars belief. The Education Secretary, Estelle Morris, last week ordered thousands of London teachers and thus children to be turned away from schools at the start of the new term. She did this not because something was wrong with the schools, the teachers or the children. She did it because she was trapped by a monster of defensive bureaucracy created by herself and her predecessor, David Blunkett, in the belief that they could run schools better than head teachers or local councils. They cannot. As this saga shows, they couldn't run a whelk stall.

The safest place children can be is in school. Ms Morris, who claims now to be concerned for their safety, apparently thought them safer fending for themselves in empty houses, back alleys, with baby-sitters or on the streets. But since she is not responsible for children outside school, that is not her problem. Risk is not her business. She simply wants to be politically in the clear, "100 per cent safe". Her safest school would presumably be shut permanently.

Teachers are actually employed by schools and local councils, not by Ms Morris. But she has found it politically expedient to overrule them in the matter of vetting. Of course child abuse is a danger, though not a big one. Head teachers used to take up references and, if in doubt, check with the police.

The process worked. On the latest figures, 0.1 per cent of child-abuse cases involve teachers, against 90 per cent involving parents and relatives. The Soham murders were a shock, but they were a tragic one-off. No sensible employer would treat every member of a school's staff as under suspicion as a result. Ms Morris does.

Last year, ministers told schools they should no longer rely on personal checks but instead use a firm chosen by the Home Office at a cost of £400 million. The contract to pry into the most intimate details of 55,000 teachers' lives went to a subsidiary of Capita Group plc, with the pseudo-official title of the Criminal Records Bureau. Teachers had to fill in voluminous forms with mostly irrelevant details.

These had to be checked and sent back for correction. The informality of personal references was replaced by computer box-ticking. Civil court cases, often the best warning of trouble, were omitted as too hard. The company has proved not up to the job, with 5,000 London teachers possibly waiting until Christmas for "clearance".

And for what? As of this week no one has admitted to a single case of suspected paedophilia from this monumental inquisition. It is a farce, a classic example of why managerial discretion should never be taken away from responsible employers, let alone given to Whitehall. London children are now more at risk from accidents, drugdealing, loss of schooling and domestic child abuse than from any dodgy teachers.

With monumental cheek, John Prescott's department last month announced that any local council that demonstrated "poor performance" would be taken over by Whitehall. Who takes over from Whitehall's incompetence?

Capita is the leader of a new breed of what in Latin America are called "parastatals". They are companies which depend on government contacts and revenue to cream large profits from public services. The company is run by a multi-millionaire named Rod Aldridge, flavour of the year to the managerial whizkids in Tony Blair's Cabinet Office. Mr Aldridge shrewdly took privatisation out of the politically delicate realm of prisons, hospitals and railways into the back offices of public administration. He is the impresario of call centres, tax collectors, rent gatherers and paper- pushers. Mr Aldridge claims to be worth £92 million. Capita is now in the FT-100 with a market value of some £2.6 billion - all at your and my expense. It is doubling in size each two years, booming from a demoralised Civil Service and a collapsing public service ethos. With 13,000 staff it is bigger than most Whitehall departments. Capita offers the Treasury a short cut to its dream, of an entirely " contractual" public sector, circumventing local democracy with statistical performance targets fixed in Whitehall.

As we have seen this week, it is unaccountable since no minister will claim it. I doubt if Capita will lose a penny for the teacher-vetting fiasco, let alone compensate teachers, schools or parents for the huge on-cost of its failure.

Much bureaucracy can be privatised. Much cannot. Much public service is not susceptible to subcontract. It depends on a bond of accountability that requires political leadership. The Railtrack failure showed that contracts cannot handle certain risks. After a bad crash, Railtrack closed the network. Mass hysteria about paedophilia has locked thousands of teachers out of work because no minister had the guts to be sensible.

The department of education wants to nationalise all schools. It embodies the lack of faith in localism typical of Blairite public administration. Yet in its handling of the vetting affair it failed the most elementary test of school administration, to get teachers in front of classes on the first day of term.

I am sure Ms Morris does not feel remotely to blame, which is why until last night she appeared to have vanished from this mess. She thought she had "sold the blame" to Capita for £400 million. Yet when asked to waive the regulations for the time being to let children be taught, she was terrified of being thought soft on paedophilia. She would not let schools vet their own teachers. Yet she would not take any responsibility herself.

Now nobody is responsible for the chaos in schools, the parents who must stay away from work, the teachers left idle, or the form-filling, mindboggling, demoralising pointlessness of it all.

Readers may care to know of Capita's next lucky contract. When they have finished vetting teachers they will turn their well-honed skills to, guess what? Ken Livingstone has asked them to run the London Congestion Charge.

Heaven preserve us all.