Children's authors revolt over anti-paedophile database

Some of Britain's top children's authors are to stop visiting schools in protest at a "preposterous" government plan to make them register on a database in case they pose a risk to children.

Philip Pullman, Anne Fine, Anthony Horowitz, Michael Morpurgo and Quentin Blake have all criticised the plan to put their names on the database meant to protect children from paedophiles.

The Vetting and Barring Scheme is managed by the Independent Safeguarding Authority, set up after the murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells by Ian Huntley, a school caretaker, in 2002.

The database, due to come online on 12 October, will list adults approved to work with children and those who are barred.

It will be a legal requirement for employees and volunteers in schools to register from November next year. Those in paid employment will have to pay a £64 registration fee. Volunteers will not have to pay.

Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, described the Home Office policy as "corrosive and poisonous to every kind of healthy social interaction". He told the Independent: "I've been going into schools as an author for 20 years, and on no occasion have I ever been alone with a child. The idea that I have become more of a threat and I need to be vetted is both ludicrous and insulting."

Former Children's Laureate Anne Fine said the scheme would drive a wedge between children and adults. She said: "When it [the VBS] becomes essential, I shall continue to work only in foreign schools, where sanity prevails."

Morpurgo, also a former Children's Laureate, added: "Writers don't go to schools for the money, they do it because they want to bring their stories to children and make readers of them. The notion that I should somehow have got myself passed in order to do this is absurd."

Horowitz, author of the Alex Rider children's spy novels, said: "A child who admires a writer has a great belief in that writer as a good human being," he said. "If you say the guy who's writing this book could be a sick pervert and we've got to protect you from him, you're not exactly sending out the most positive message."

A spokesman from the Home Office said the VBS scheme would make Britain's regulations "even more rigorous".