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Only a few years ago the protection of vulnerable adults moved up the policy agenda as child protection had a couple of decades earlier. The challenge of preventing and responding to adult abuse was different from that of child abuse, but what they had in common was the secrecy of the crime, the exploitation of the weak by the strong and the reluctance of society to admit the existence of this dark underside. During the 1990s policies and procedures were produced locally to deal with the abuse of vulnerable adults and by the end of the decade the Department of Health had produced guidance on implementing multi-agency policies to tackle the problem.


So it is a sad comment on the priorities of this government that the momentum has been lost. While child protection takes on ever-increasing significance, adult protection has all but disappeared from view. The latest setback is the omission of Criminal Records Bureau checks from new standards covering staff working in home care, even though they had been included in the earlier draft standards. The draft said that the CRB checks were "necessary because of the nature of personal domiciliary care". Well, if such checks were necessary then, they are surely necessary now, and the Department of Health's decision to leave them out of the final version can only be a craven expedient to relieve the CRB of further embarrassment over its backlog of work. There isn't even a role in the standards for the Protection of Vulnerable Adults list, which was supposedly to be introduced under the Care Standards Act 2000.

None of this is to say that the standards entirely neglect adult abuse. But if it is genuinely committed to eradicating this peculiarly nasty and insidious crime, the government must regain the sense of urgency that has lately been so seriously lacking.