CR spoke with the Christian Institute about Scotland's named person scheme

Simon: The way the Scottish Government speak about this is they don't talk about a Government-approved manner, they talk about wellbeing. That's one of these buzzwords. We're all in favour of wellbeing, but what does that actually mean?

There is something called the SHANARI principles, where the Government want children to be assessed to find out whether they are safe and happy and all these other concepts like achieving and responsibility. They are vague, warm words, which in themselves no-one would object to, but when you give a checklist like that and put it in the hands of a Government official who knows that his neck is on the block if something goes wrong with one of the hundreds of kids under his care, you go into a situation where they are assessing somebody's parenting to see whether it meets the state's criterion. They are advising parents on how to do parenting with a set of state-approved tools and that's very worrying.

There's an inversion here and the inversion is that this legislation says that the state is primarily responsible for children and parents have a role in that as long as they do it in the way that the state officials approve of, whereas the reality, the truth of it is that parents have the primary responsibility for raising their children. They know what's best for their kids, they're the ones who are accountable to God, accountable to everybody else for how they raise their own kids. The state should only step in where there is evidence of actual significant risk of harm. That's been the principle that we've abided by for some time now, but this is changing that. This is saying: No, the state can step in whenever, wherever it likes; there doesn't have to be any evidence of harm and there doesn't have to be any evidence of risk. There doesn't have to be a trigger; we're just giving a blanket power to Government officials and you'll just have to trust us that we'll only use it in the right ways all the time.

Well that's not the way we do things in Britain. We don't give Government unlimited power and say: We just trust you to only use it when it's right. We limit, we delineate the powers of the Government, we delineate the powers of state officials, so that they know where their authority ends - and that is a much better way of going about things and it's worrying that this inverts that principle.

Heather: For any parent that might be a concern, but specifically for Christians, in relation to these wellbeing things and state perspective on that, there's obviously been a lot of cases, whether it's from the NHS or councils, with Christians being sacked from jobs because of offering prayer, or issues to do with wearing crosses, issues to do with perspectives on sexuality, same-sex marriage, things like that. So would those things become a problem and bring them into conflict with these state guardians in bringing up their children within the Christian faith?

Simon: Yes. I work with the Christian Institute and the Christian Institute has become part of the No To Named Persons Campaign, in part precisely because of those kinds of concerns. Christians know that these days there is often, at best, a lack of comprehension on the part of officials and others in public life: a lack of comprehension about where we're coming from and what we believe. There is also a subset of people who seem to want to misrepresent where we're coming from and so they attribute unpleasant and unkind motives to us and they misrepresent what we believe. I'm bound to say at this point that Christians throughout history and throughout the world are familiar with this, as it's what happens, but we have to fight against it, because it can become very dangerous. It can mean that people assume that you're malign; that they're benign and so they get to dictate your life and to decide what you should and shouldn't do. They get to have authority or indeed even to punish at its worst. So, yes, Christians who bring up their children in the Christian faith, who teach them the Bible at home, take them to church on a Sunday - that may mean that they don't allow their children to take part in Sunday football leagues because they want them to be able to always be at church with them on Sunday. Now for us that's a normal natural decision that we would talk through with our kids and we would try and help them to understand it and we would do that because we thought it's pleasing to God for them to be in church on a Sunday - but to somebody outside the families, somebody who's not necessarily sympathetic to the Christian faith, they may just see that as the family being over-religious, narrow, depriving a child of an exciting opportunity. You could imagine a dispute between an official with a secularist view of the world on the one hand and a family with a clear Christian worldview on the other: you could imagine that sort of dispute arising. And if that official has authority over the life of that child, they may start to exercise it in a way which causes real conflict for that family.

Heather: Does this not contravene some human rights law somewhere? There's just been the case with assisted suicide: they were bringing up the right to a private life. Are there not some human rights laws here that this is violating?

Simon: Well you ask a good question and you're right. The Christian Institute has received legal advice from Aidan O'Neill QC, a senior lawyer, that in fact the named person legislation may well breach the European Convention on Human Rights and the Article 8 right to privacy and the right to a family life. For that reason the Christian Institute, joined by lots of other groups and individuals, has launched a judicial review of the named person legislation. That judicial review will ask the court to consider whether the legislation breaches the right to privacy and family life and if it does we'll be asking the court to strike down either the whole of the legislation or those parts of the legislation which breach the Convention rights. With Scottish legislation the courts have the power to do that. The Scottish courts have previously ruled against legislation that has been passed by the Parliament and so it's possible that they may do so on this occasion.

Heather: The Scottish Government have announced 500 health visitors at a cost of over £40 million to implement this. How does the Scottish public respond in a time of cuts and finances being difficult that that much is being spent on the scheme?

Simon: And that's not by any means the full cost of the scheme: that's just the cost of appointing these new health visitors.

The reaction that I see from members of the public in Scotland is disbelief. They want scarce public money, taxpayers' money, to be spent on the most essential systems and the idea that the Scottish Government is bolting on this extravagant and expensive and unnecessary new system during a time where taxpayers' money is scarcer, they find that hard to believe.

The press is referring to them as 'state snoopers' - the fact that these people will have the power to pry into family life just really adds insult to injury. It seems a remarkable loss of perspective.

As I say, we all want to see children who are genuinely in need properly cared for, but we have laws to deal with bad parents who neglect and abuse their children; we have social work departments and we have very capable people working within the police who are familiar with the signs of abuse and neglect and familiar with their legal powers to deal with those parents. And we have, I like to think, a slightly better sense as a society of our own responsibility if we are aware of other families, perhaps people even within our own family, where things are going wrong. I think perhaps we have a strong sense of our own responsibility to try and bring in the authorities at the right time to provide the right kind of help to try and deal with those situations. So there are much more targeted, common-sense and effective ways of dealing with these things. But if you appoint a named person for every child, regardless of need, you institute a system where you put a burden of responsibility on those named persons which they can't possibly carry; you put a burden on the taxpayer which is unnecessary and you invade the privacy of families and, yes, you possibly breach privacy rights and even religious rights of individual families. The children who are genuinely being neglected, who are genuinely being mistreated, are then going to be pushed further towards the back of the queue. It's very counterproductive and I think that the more people see of the Scottish named person plan the less they like it.

Heather: Finally, do you think this is just isolated to Scotland, the desire to bring something through like this, or would you have concerns about it creeping into England and a bill ending up coming before our Parliament like this?