Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Friday 21st January 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, I want to say a few words on the Bill because it is a good time to raise an issue that has been a problem for some time.

I remember that one of the problems with revising the legislation was raised by a working party on the issue about 10 years ago. The working party became bogged down in trying to decide when a sentence started and ended, because sometimes proper records were not kept on when offenders moved to the first prison. Was the period calculated from when the offenders first went into the police station cells? When were they released? The working party lost sight of the objective—that was the trouble.

I hope that we do not lose sight of the objective, which is to allow people to get back into society in such a way that they can support their families. If you cannot support your family, you are a bit stuck. Providing such support is at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—for those who have heard of him—which is the need for food and shelter. If you cannot get a job, what are you going to do? You have to support your family and you probably turn back to crime. It is rather obvious. The major objective of the Bill is to allow people properly to earn some income again.

However, you have to protect people from employing others who may be dangerous in certain ways. How do we get around the fact that a financial services employer is allowed to reject someone on whatever grounds, because they can look at the criminal record, whereas a small company may have to employ someone with a known history of fraud who can bankrupt it? That is difficult, because what matters is the type of crime that was committed and the type of job that the person will do. If someone is prone to violence, you do not want them to deal with people. If someone is prone to fraud, you do not want them to handle your money. If someone is prone to violence, you might well let them handle your money as long as they are not working close to someone whom they might damage. The problem is that we throw everything out of the window together.

A couple of years ago, the papers had a wonderful report—it was not wonderful but, rather, quite the opposite—about a head teacher who was caught fishing without a rod licence and duly prosecuted. Immediately, the school governors said that they would have to consider whether he could stay on as a head teacher. Honestly, have we no common sense at all? I do not know what actually happened, because I read only the first newspaper report.

There is also the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, about drugs. People often commit crimes in order to try to pay for their drugs. They will mug people and nick things. If you deal with the drug problem, they are cured and on the straight and narrow, so there is probably no danger of them mugging people. There would be no purpose to that. We need to look at some of the circumstances behind this issue. It is essential to get such people back into work.

One issue that I really want to tackle is reprimands and cautions, which I have discovered are highly dangerous. The police will say to someone, “Just accept a caution and you will not hear anything more about it, and it will all be okay”. The same happens with children who are under 16—or who are 16 and under—who receive what is called a reprimand. You are told, “Once you are 18, it will be off your record. Don’t worry. People will not hear any more about it”. However, that is not the case. If a young person accepts a caution or a child accepts a reprimand, the police have stated that a crime has been committed and that guilt has been admitted. The person then has a criminal conviction. On the police records the matter is simple: “Crime committed; cleared up”. That looks good on the police records and there is much less paperwork, yet in reality the records do not stay under the table but remain for life for certain crimes.

If there is a CRB check and the criminal record relates to something that is not too serious, there may not be a problem, but what if it has an effect on a US visa application? Let us examine the life of an active child who is going places but gets into playground spats and has a fight with another child in the playground. These days, teachers are not allowed to interfere or touch the children so they have to ring the police, who come along, separate the children and say, “Shall we take them down to the station and give them a reprimand? Then they will take this seriously”. Off they go to the police station and the police say, “Accept the reprimand and that will be it. Do not misbehave again”. So the children accept it, but they now have ABH, affray or GBH on their record. Those are serious offences. In future, the person will not be allowed to work with children, youths or adults or become a coach or anything like that—or possibly even get an American visa, because they will no longer qualify for the visa waiver. This may come to light only when they are a rising market trader in a large city bank that wants to move them to America—and then their career is over. We should look at this because it is not as simple as it seems.

Perhaps it is worth recounting another typical story. A child is walking the family dog on a footpath. A jogger comes a bit close. The dog does not like the look of him and gives him a nip. The man runs on and then complains to the police, because a village argument is going on and he thinks that he is being clever. The police interview the child, nothing happens for about three months and then they decide to prosecute under the Dangerous Dogs Act. That is a serious, high-level criminal offence. The police tell the child that his dog will be destroyed. Why did they not use the 1871 Act—the so-called “postman Act”—which makes it a civil offence and does not result in the destruction of the dog? Normally that would have been done, but probably they wanted to get the conviction rate up. In this case, which I know about, the child was advised to say that he would plead not guilty and the police withdrew charges. I hope that the magistrates would have thrown out the case. However, most children would have accepted the advice of the solicitor to admit the charge so that their dog would survive. This sort of thing goes on behind the scenes. If the child had accepted a conviction, his life would have been the same as those of many others: a serious offence would be on his record for ever. We need to look at that side of the system, because it is not working at all.

My final point concerns the big challenge posed by the internet world, in which I live a lot, and in particular by social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and XING—all the bits and pieces that look at your life. One can look up someone and find out other things about them, such as the companies they worked for in the past, the things that they have done and the associations that they have had. It is difficult nowadays totally to rehabilitate oneself and erase all the pictures of what has gone before. I do not know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Perhaps we will have to be more accepting of certain behaviours and, instead of a blanket ban on anyone who has a criminal record, we will come round to saying, “They did something a bit silly, but we can handle it”. Perhaps society should be a bit more tolerant. When I think of half the people I know, I have no idea how we would teach people to be like that. It is a perpetual problem.

I would like to know, if the Minister has the figure to hand, what proportion of adults have a criminal conviction stemming from their childhood that they carry for the rest of their life. I have no feel for whether it is one in 100 or one in 20. I suspect that the figure is higher than we think. In that case, we would have to think about how society can handle it. Therefore, I welcome the Bill. I hope that it will get people thinking properly about the issue and move the discussion forward in a sensible and constructive way.