It would not be appropriate to introduce Sarah’s Law in the island, MLCs have been told.

Questions about bringing in a child sex offender disclosure scheme were raised as the Legislative Council debated the clauses stage of the Sexual Offences and Obscene Publications Bill.

Kate Lord-Brennan MLC said she was keen to know why we couldn’t have such a disclosure scheme here.

Tanya August-Hanson MLC, who is leading the Bill through LegCo although she is no longer a member of the Department of Home Affairs, set out the department's position.

She said:’The arguments in the UK don’t stack up over here. The sex offenders here are known to police. They are not particularly worried about them being forced underground or anything like that,’ she told MLCs.

She said there had been no incident that had prompted interest in Sarah’s Law although she acknowledged that concerns had been raised in the past in relation to unregistered babysitters.

Tom Bateman, legislation manager at the DHA, told LegCo that the department’s long-standing position on Sarah’s Law is that it is ’not appropriate for the context of the island’.

He said: ’The Chief Constable has been clear that they are well aware of where persons are. I think on a wider front, one would say that these kinds of schemes only tell you so much, they only tell you at a particular time.

’What the police do in terms of public safety is keeping awareness all the time. We believe the work of the public protection unit in the island is actually sufficient for our purposes.’

Mr Batemen said it was also important to remember the balance between having a bureaucratic Sarah’s Law system and a matter where the police are always alert.

He said other clauses in the Bill, dealing with sexual risk orders, sexual harm orders with notification, were significant and these, in the context our of community, are ’more than enough’. ’Sarah’s Law may be appropriate elsewhere but not here,’ he said.

The child sex offender disclosure scheme in England and Wales, known as Sarah’s Law, was introduced initially as a pilot scheme in 2008.

It was the result of a campaign launched in response to the murder of schoolgirl Sarah Payne in July 2000.

The disclosure scheme allows parents, carers and guardians to formally ask the police if someone with access to their child has a record for child sexual offences.

Police will reveal details confidentially if they think it is in the child’s interests.

Campaigners submitted a petition in 2011 to then Home Affairs Minister Adrian Earnshaw urging him to introduce a similar law here. This led the government to set up a working group to consider all child protection arrangements.