We've become a paranoid and trustless society

It is quite a spectacle, the Criminal Record Bureau's race to ensure the nation's state schools haven't accidently hired any notorious paedophiles. My own favourite moment was the one where the Department of Education relaxed the rules so that "staff who have moved directly from one school to another and have previously been checked are being allowed to start work before the full checks are complete, providing their references have been taken up."

I mean, no wonder this organisation – part Home Office, part private company on a £400m 10-year contract – can't cope. Why is the education department subjecting every single person who starts a new job this term to three separate checks for their suitability to work with children, when the majority of these people were working with children perfectly well six weeks ago?

Until recently, teachers could make the most important of these checks anyway, by referring to the education department's List 99 of people unsuitable to work with children. Now, after much vociferous campaigning for such lists to be available to the public, even teachers can no longer see them. Access is only available through the new vetting procedure and the list is closed to all except the CRB itself.

All teachers themselves can now do, apart from waiting for the CRB to give the go-ahead, is be scrupulous in following up references, which surely they always have been. Let's hope they continue to be, even though such a large amount of the responsibility for hiring staff has been taken out of their hands.

Because, isn't checking with the line manager in the last job far more practical and useful than checking any number of lists? No list is going to include a half-formed suspicion from teachers that there was something a bit creepy about so-and-so, and that her parting from the school was far from amicable.

Maybe, Amy Gehring-like, she was too suggestively dressed, and too familiar with the boys in her classes. Or maybe it was something else, something undefinable, nothing a complaint could be based on, but an instinctive worry predicated on nothing more than years of experience.

All that counts for nothing now, though. What use can a person with an acute understanding of human nature offer, when there's a computer database to do the work? If I were an experienced headteacher with an excellent recruit – glowing references, sound track-record - ready to start a new job, I'd be somewhat irritated to find my opinion counted for nothing and that I had to wait for the overdue say-so of someone drafted in from the passport office before I could unleash the recruit on my school.

But that sort of bolshie attitude, it seems, puts one very much in the minority. I don't think the CRB is such a bad idea as a resource for professionals who wish to consult it. But this compulsory checking of everyone, even if the person you are hiring is someone you've known all of your life, suggests to me only that we are a paranoid, neurotic and trustless society. Worse, we are only likely to get more fearful, and less certain of our culture's ability, on the whole, to look after itself.

Early in the summer, before we'd all heard of Soham and before the charging of caretaker Ian Huntley had sent the department of Education into headless chicken mode – my husband was proudly telling a couple of other parents how well his 12-year-old was taking to negotiating his way around the Tube.

Realising that something wasn't quite comfortable, he trailed to a halt. The other parents were staring at him in horror and amazement. One declared that he'd never, ever, let his 16-year-old daughter travel alone on the underground. The other confirmed such over-protective reticence as perfectly normal, with the words: "Not while there's a single paedophile."

I find their attitudes absurd. What is parenting, if not the preparation of a child for the challenges of adult life? By denying their older children some limited freedom to explore the world independently, these adults are instead encouraging their children to remain dependent and infantilised and, therefore, in so much more danger than they could be.

What a pitiful nation we looked when surveyed, for example, through the (no doubt) distorting lens of Direct Line Rescue's latest research. More than 80 per cent of female motorists would prefer spending the night locked in their car to accepting assistance from a stranger. Which is good news in a way, since only 38 per cent of 18-24-year-olds would consider stopping to help a motorist in distress - or apparent distress as most people would suspect that they were being tricked.

But while this may indeed be pitiful – human beings too distrustful of each other to offer help or to accept help – it also makes us pitiless. What all of the fear about paedophiles, and the demands for registers, checks and warnings supposes, is that we can always be made safe from danger. The CRBs elaborate system can only ever warn about peodophiles who have already struck, and the same goes for Sarah's Law. But what those who place their trust in such systems really want is something more foolproof - a cast iron promise that our society is risk-free.

That cannot ever be achieved. But already extraordinary liberties are being taken by a government that actually seems to want to deliver this dream. The misplaced faith in the CRB and its elaborate, expensive, deeply limited system, is just one aspect of this desire. The yearning for hi-tech identity cards – electronically advertising known paedophiles when placed in the right machine, one assumes – is another.

But the most cruel and ghastly part of the government's misplaced tendency to seek what can only be called utopian totalitarianism, is surely the draft legislation wending its way though government, and designed to "close a loophole" in the mental health act.

This, in our pointless pursuit of the risk-free world, seeks to incarcerate indefinitely those whose personality disorders are are deemed to be a "risk" to the community. It is quite something, the idea that an illness can cost us our liberty for a lifetime. But we seem happy to accept it – for others anyway – rather than accept the fact that a degree of danger is a part of life, even though we are the among the least endangered people who have ever walked the earth.

Not, paradoxically, that it's considered safe to walk the earth any more. Even the delighful Ms Elizabeth Hurley has recently been giving survival advice. She says one should wear training shoes while walking anywhere in London that isn't carpeted in red, and opines that there should be many more bobbies on the beat.

But since bobbies all over the country are answering the phone to the CRB, reassuring them that teachers of long professional standing don't have criminal records, that's not so likely to happen for some time to come. Because when the school staff are finally done, there's plenty of other deadlines that have already been missed.

The 1 August deadline for care home owners and managers – a sector which, unlike schools, does not have a good record – has been abandoned. Checks on 100,000 agency nurses have been delayed for a second time.

Which only goes to show that building a risk-free society is a very risky business in itself.

d.orr@independent.co.uk