ESTELLE Morris was wrong, Patrick Scott was right.

Mr Scott, City of York Council's education director, bravely ignored the Education Secretary's advice to refuse to let unvetted teachers into the classroom. As a result, York schools avoided the chaos elsewhere and started the school year almost as normal.

Mr Scott was right to take the view that children faced a much greater risk locked out of school than they did inside the classroom from a teacher who had yet to be checked.

Ms Morris has U-turned and apologised, but was quick to pin the blame elsewhere. "I am a very dissatisfied customer," she said, pointing the finger at the Criminal Records Bureau for getting so far behind.

This will not wash. Two weeks ago, after the Soham murders, ministers decided to require all new teaching staff to be vetted by the bureau. This was a knee-jerk reaction of the worst kind, when politicians rush to "do something" in the wake of national events, and repent at leisure.

Ministers then ignored the warning that the bureau's backlog was such that it would not finish its checks until two weeks after the start of term.

Moreover, the private company that co-runs the bureau, Capita, has the sort of dismal track record that suggested this fiasco was inevitable. Capita was lambasted by MPs for mismanaging individual learning accounts, and before that was in trouble over the since-scrapped nursery vouchers scheme.

Needless to say, Capita has 11 contracts with the Home Office alone, and three of its executives paid themselves bonuses of £7.5 million this year.

The Criminal Records Bureau's remit will soon go beyond staff from schools, hospitals and the care sector. From next year all employers can ask potential workers to produce a basic criminal record check, bought from the bureau.

If the Government is a "very dissatisfied customer" it should close down the bureau and return to the cheaper and more efficient vetting schemes in place previously, before the bureau's incompetence is allowed to spread any further.

Updated: 10:59 Thursday, September 05, 2002