Disclosure of Youth Criminal Records

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Thursday 28th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker.

As a fellow member of the Justice Committee, I congratulate the Chair of the Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), on securing this incredibly important debate. I will speak briefly about the employment prospects of those with youth criminal records.

Over 11 million people in the UK have a criminal record. As we have heard, many of their convictions are disclosed through the Disclosure and Barring Service checks when people seek certain types of employment. In 2014-15—the year that the statistics on which the Committee’s report is based were drawn from—around a quarter of all the standard and enhanced DBS checks that flagged up a previous conviction related to people who were under 18 when they had committed an offence.

As my Committee colleagues and I have discussed in recent debates about short sentencing and rehabilitation, a progressive and modem justice system must ensure that those who have committed crimes previously are not unnecessarily punished time and time again, particularly as a result of the disproportionate impact that a conviction can have on their ability to secure employment.

As noted by the charity Unlock, a criminal record acquired by a young person can continue to impact them for the rest of their life. That is not an exaggeration. In the past five years, over 1 million criminal records that related to offences from more than 30 years ago were disclosed through DBS checks. Although a criminal conviction does not necessarily act as a bar to employment, that is still potentially 1 million people unable to pursue the career path of their choice. Of course, those individuals who have committed serious offences need to face restrictions on the jobs that they are able to undertake, but we should consider the implications of the current system for the vast majority of individuals with historical minor offences on their record.

The case studies used in the Committee’s report underline that. There was the teacher who had committed two offences 38 years earlier: the first was petty theft, which was described as a silly prank and for which they received a conditional discharge; the second was actual bodily harm after they had got into a scrape and pushed someone to the ground, and for which they had been fined £10. That individual explained that

“since then I’ve become a teacher. I was a Deputy Head for some 20 years, but now I’ve started supply teaching, I have to explain these as if I am now a criminal.”

Moreover, the statistics that we have reflect only those people with criminal records who have applied for DBS-compliant jobs. There could be countless other people who have been put off from applying for jobs because of embarrassment or a reluctance to reveal previous convictions.

I fully endorse the Justice Committee’s recommendation in the report that suggests that Ban the Box should be extended to all public sector vacancies, and that the Government should consider making it mandatory for all employers. Previously advocated by the Work and Pensions Committee in 2015, the Ban the Box campaign seeks to remove the criminal record tick box from job application forms, and instead candidates would be asked about criminal convictions later. That might seem like a small move and, as others have said, it is not perfect, but it would open up job application opportunities to those who might not otherwise consider making such an application.

Meaningful rehabilitation must be precisely that. It must be holistic, both inside and outside prison environments, and enable people who have offended in their youth to be fully able to pursue careers, rather than leaving them blighted by criminal convictions from decades earlier. The Government’s response to the Committee’s report acknowledges that, on release from custody, people are six to nine percentage points less likely to reoffend if they enter employment, and I welcome the steps taken in recent years to roll out Ban the Box across civil service vacancies.

On Tuesday, the Committee took evidence from my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who I see is no longer in his place, following his review of the treatment of and outcomes for black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals in the criminal justice system, and he made a very powerful argument here today. The Ministry of Justice’s employment and education plan from 2018 notes that criminal record checks may cause additional stigma for those in the BAME community, and we must do more to address that.

As my fellow Committee members have already referred to, it is often some of the most vulnerable people who have been affected by the rules around the disclosure of criminal convictions. Take the case of Sammy Woodhouse, a woman who was the victim of childhood sexual exploitation but was given a criminal record, and who has painfully had to relive her trauma following the disclosure of her convictions. Sammy has been a tireless campaigner and has undertaken a huge array of admirable work since waiving her anonymity, but the fact remains that no matter how much people such as Sammy want to use their experiences to help others in vulnerable situations, the barriers to employment in those areas still exist for them, because they have that criminal record against their name. But it is precisely people like Sammy whose experiences, no matter how horrifying, could help others in similar situations. By treating people like Sammy as victims rather than criminals, we would give them the opportunities that they rightly deserve.

I agree with the Select Committee report’s conclusion that the principles of youth rehabilitation are undermined by the system for disclosure of youth criminal records. We are capable of making significant progress on that issue: the Ban the Box initiative should be rolled out fully across the public and private sectors, combined with an appropriate DBS system that ensures records are disclosed only when the conviction is relevant to the job being applied for and proportionate to the offence. We all need to be able to have faith in a holistic, empathetic, rehabilitative justice system that gives young offenders a chance to move on from past mistakes.

I again thank the Chair of the Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, for his work on this issue. I look forward to working with him and other Committee colleagues to further our efforts in this important area.