Disclosure of Youth Criminal Records

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Thursday 28th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Robert Neill]

Again, my hon. Friend raises a fair point—it is not the immediate subject of our inquiry, but it is a good point. Perhaps, in our joint work on the Select Committee, that is something we could look at taking forward, because there is no doubt that that legislation has also failed to keep in touch with changes in science and technology.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Further to exactly that point, although it is not directly relevant to the discussion here, we must all accept the fact that that information is held independently and above that which we can legislate for in this place. I am aware that work is coming forward from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to address that, but, in all honesty, although we can tamper at the edges and change things in ways that make us feel better and directly make the lives of young offenders better, unless we can control how information about private individuals is used, we can have very little effect on the future.

[Robert Neill]

That is certainly true, and it indicates the need for a much more joined-up and holistic approach to dealing with this matter. I am sure it is something we need to return to and address. Although it can only deal with a part of that problem, disclosure and barring needs to be resolved itself. The updating of the whole approach to dealing with criminal records, disclosure of information and the regulation of social media is important, because all of them can get in the way of helping people to turn their lives around.

The point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) about examples from other countries is significant. Our criminal justice system has some of the worst reoffending results among our comparators, and one reason for that is the difficulty of getting people back into employment, education, homes, work and relationships. To a greater or lesser degree, the mechanistic operation of the current disclosure and barring system can be a bar to people moving on in those directions, all of which, the evidence overwhelmingly shows, make people less likely to reoffend. We are getting in the way of that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Lammy]

rose—

[Liz Saville Roberts]

rose—

[Robert Neill]

Let me just make one more point and then I will give way. I want to deal with the Government response to our report and then I will happily give way again.

Those were the guts, to put it inelegantly, of our recommendations. The Ban the Box approach should be extended to all public sector vacancies, with a view to that becoming in due course mandatory for all employers. That would be the right response. We pointed out also that the disclosure regime may well fall short of the UK’s obligations under the UN convention on the rights of the child, which prioritises the best interests of the child and requires states parties to promote the establishment of penal laws and procedures “specifically applicable to children”. The broad-brush approach here does not seem to us to meet that test.

--- Later in debate ---

[Liz Saville Roberts]

The hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. It is of course to be welcomed that Ban the Box has, as I understand it, been adopted in principle for civil servant recruitment, but I wonder how many people who are former offenders the Ministry of Justice would be able to employ in its own Department. This is just a proposition: to what degree within procurement could there be concomitant employment of ex-offenders in, say, maintenance contracts and other contracts that the Department releases?

[Robert Neill]

We talked about extending the initiative to all public sector vacancies, and I can see the logic of making this a condition of public procurement more generally. It is an interesting point that the right hon. Lady fairly raises. Like her, I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response. These levers are within the Government’s gift and there would be no requirement for primary legislation or anything of that kind.

Against that background, we were disappointed in the Government’s response. It was not entirely negative, but it did seem to us to lack a degree of urgency. It cited the litigation on criminal records that was ongoing at that time in the Supreme Court as a reason not to go into too much detail on most of our important recommendations. There was almost a predictive text response of, “It would not be appropriate to consider these matters until there has been an authoritative judgment from the Supreme Court.” That has now changed, as I will come to.

I recognise and welcome the positives in the Government response. The Government accepted parts of the report, in particular the commitment to improving information and guidance and exploring options for promoting Ban the Box—one of those has been suggested by the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts)—and there is willingness to work with the insurance industry to ensure that it operates more fairly in relation to spent convictions. I say to the Minister that that is all good, but we need more.

A concern for us was how policy is difficult to drive forward because it sits uneasily between the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. That is a classic case of a desirable change falling through the gap between two Departments. If we are committed to more cross-governmental working, more could and should be done.