Criminal Records (Public Access) Bill

Debate between Clive Efford and Christopher Chope

Friday 13th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

I shall be as brief as the Bill, which contains only a few clauses. The hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) has pointed out the anomaly that if someone is present in a court or reads a court report, its decisions are a matter of public record but that as time passes the case becomes subject to freedom of information provisions. He made it clear that the intention of the Bill is that such information should be available online. I was wondering about that, because it occurred to me that if we wanted to find out about an individual, we would have to happen across the particular magistrates court that held their record. However, he suggests that he would amend the Bill to clarify that point.

I am not sure that the Bill is consistent with our debates in Committee on the Protection of Freedoms Bill. The hon. Gentleman may not be aware that there was considerable debate about returning information supplied for Criminal Records Bureau checks to the individual so that they could check its accuracy before it was passed to a potential employer or a voluntary organisation. The hon. Gentleman’s Bill does not seem consistent with the Government’s direction of travel in that regard.

[Mr Chope]

Unlike the Criminal Records Bureau, the Bill would not rely on gossip, hearsay or information about cautions or about people who are arrested on suspicion but not charged. It would deal only with written registers from magistrates courts.

[Clive Efford]

I accept that point, and I shall speak briefly about accuracy of information in a moment.

Before the debate I checked the internet, as I was concerned about some of the fee-charging organisations that purport to provide information about criminal record checks. There seemed to be no way to check the background of such organisations to find out whether they were sound and operated reliable processes. A job applicant might find that an employer uses such services and that the information is inaccurate. That is a matter of concern, and is something that the hon. Gentleman has highlighted—yet, the Bill would not deal with it.

There have been cases when information from magistrates courts has been called into question. Between 1980 and 2006, there was a substantial incident in Leeds when more than 2,000 cases were not recorded accurately at a magistrates court and a number of people avoided sentences and fines. It was thus not possible to check their records at a later date. One of the reasons given for that failure was the amount of bureaucracy and the burden it placed on magistrates courts, so we should want to consider the implications of the Bill for magistrates courts before we might support it.

We have no objection in principle to the hon. Gentleman’s desire to share information that is already in the public domain. The force of the logic in his argument is on record, but at this stage he has failed to convince us that the Bill would solve the problems and that it would not have unintended consequences. We will be interested to hear the Government’s response to his contribution.