Crime continues – so to speak – with a session for the Lib Dem Home Affairs Team as a prequel to Home Office Questions at 2.30. We thrash around the issues of the day. At the moment with the Home Office in chaos and the Home Secretary is making policy on the run. We are rather spoilt for choice. We choose to go on Sarah’s List. As the emotive tensions rise and all of us who are parents, including me, wrestle with our desire to know where paedophiles are so we can protect are children, with the real fact that doing so is likely to send them underground where we have no idea where they are. This is about what’s effective – not what sounds tough or soft, but what will work to protect our children best.

Nick Clegg (Shadow Home Secretary) brings up the fact that in the USA where Megan’s Law (same thing) operates the number of offenders on the sex offenders list there has fallen to 30%. Here in the UK we have around 90% on the list. So – let’s keep cool heads and not jump to the News of the World – but on the evidence as to what works.

After Questions I rush over to Sky to do a pre-record on the news that will break tomorrow about an OFSTED report showing that our schools and councils are not keeping accurate records, nor always doing appropriate criminal record checks, on sex offenders working in our schools. After the hoo-ha when it was discovered that even four years after Soham and the Bishard Recommendations, sex offenders were still being employed – and Ruth Kelly nearly lost her job – this report that she was forced into commissioning reports its damning findings tomorrow.

It’s just a parents’ nightmare. Even if checks are carried out, they are not recorded or updated – and there are virtually no checks at all after someone has been employed. There should be a rigorous duty on checks and record keeping. And then we get into more nightmares if the Government’s Education Bill goes through as the community of schools breaks down and each trust school or foundation school or independent school looks to itself. Checking and monitoring will become even more disparate. We have to have a statutory duty for schools and authorities – clear and no lapses – on this.

Otherwise we will get lynch mobs, the Government will cave in to the tabloids and our children will be less safe than ever.