Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment she has made of the effectiveness of the Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme in enabling (a) parents and (b) carers to access information about people who may pose a risk to children.

The Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme, introduced in 2011, allows members of the public to make an application to police for information about a person who has contact with a child.

To capture better data in order to review the efficacy of the Scheme, an Annual Data Requirement for police forces was introduced in April 2021, requiring police forces in England and Wales to submit data on the number of applications made, how many related to registered sex offenders and how many resulted in disclosure.

Following consultation with law enforcement and third sector partners, the police guidance and supporting documents for the scheme were updated and published in April 2023. This included supporting the introduction of online applications to the scheme, making it easier for the public to raise a concern, while also reducing the timeframe for applications to be processed and formalising proactive disclosure processes to ensure that information is provided to the right people at the right time to protect children from harm.

Through the Crime and Policing Bill, this government is going further to strengthen the scheme by seeking to place it on a statutory footing. This means that chief officers will have a statutory duty to have due regard to the guidance.