Criminal Records Bill [HL]

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 23rd February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dholakia (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for this Bill, which has the support of these Benches.

Perhaps I may first make an admission: I introduced the Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill in previous Sessions. The purpose of my Bill was to make changes to the rehabilitation periods that are completed before cautions and convictions become spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. The Bill passed all its stages in your Lordships’ House but failed to secure a First Reading in the other place. This gives me an opportunity to put on record my thanks for the support I received from my noble friend Lord McNally and from the then Secretary of State for Justice, Ken Clarke, during the coalition Government.

The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, mentioned that the Government tabled amendments to the then Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, which amended the length of rehabilitation periods and increased the scope of the Bill to cover custodial sentences of 48 months.

We have a crisis in our prisons. Rehabilitation has become a distant dream. On 16 February—a week ago—the Times reported:

“Thousands more prisoners are to be released early under a government drive to relieve pressure on overcrowded and drug-ridden jails”.


Will the Minister confirm whether that is so? The figures available for 2010 indicate that reoffending by all recent ex-prisoners was estimated to cost the economy between £9.5 billion and £13 billion annually. Will the Minister give the most up-to-date figures available on this? In the Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile, the Prison Reform Trust said:

“Nearly all prisoners (97%) said they wanted to stop offending. When asked what would be important in stopping them, most said a job (68%) and a place to live (60%)”.


I said earlier that we support the Bill, which seeks to extend the protection that the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act currently provides to former offenders who have turned their lives around and avoided reoffending for a significant period. This includes ex-offenders who have served sentences of over four years but have then left crime behind them and stayed out of trouble for more than eight years.

The Bill also reduces the periods after which convictions attracting shorter custodial sentences and community orders become spent. The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 provides that after specified “rehabilitation periods” ex-offenders do not have to declare spent convictions when applying for jobs, housing and insurance. These factors were identified in the Bromley briefings. It is worth re-emphasising that the Act does not apply to people applying for jobs in sensitive areas of work, such as criminal justice agencies, financial institutions and work involving young people or vulnerable adults. In my view, there is scope for narrowing down the exceptions to the Act, but for the present the noble Lord’s Bill would leave them as they are.

Despite those exemptions, since it was enacted in 1974, the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act has helped many ex-offenders to live down their past. Initially the Act applied only to offenders serving sentences of up to two and a half years. However, following my introduction of a series of Private Members’ Bills to reform the Act, the coalition Government agreed to extend the Act to include offenders who have served sentences of four years or less.

Even now, however, many genuinely reformed ex-offenders can never benefit from the Act. More than 7,000 people a year are given sentences of over four years. At present, they can never be rehabilitated for the purposes of the Act, however much they do to change their ways and over however long a period. Therefore, an offender who receives a four-year sentence at the age of 18 and never commits another offence is legally obliged to declare that conviction. If asked when applying for jobs at the ages of 50 or 60, this still applies to them—and that means when applying for any job, not just employment in sensitive occupations.

Our provisions are still notably less generous than the rules that apply in many other European nations. Most European countries apply rehabilitation periods to sentences of longer than four years and their rehabilitation periods are often significantly shorter than ours. Is it not time to remove this anomaly?

The same is true in relation to young offenders. In 2016, the Standing Committee for Youth Justice published a report entitled Growing Up, Moving On, which compared the treatment of young people’s criminal records in 16 comparable countries. It found that the system in England and Wales was the least generous of all the systems studied. A criminal record acquired by a juvenile in this country affects the young person for longer than in any of the 15 other countries compared in the study.

Again, since the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act was implemented, sentence lengths in this country have increased significantly. Many offenders who would have received sentences of four years or less back in 1974 are receiving sentences of five, six or seven years today. That means that many offenders who would have been helped by the current law if they had offended in the 1970s now find that their offences can never become spent during the whole of their lifetime.

Under the provisions of the noble Lord’s Bill, offenders who receive custodial sentences would have to avoid crime for a specified period after the sentence was completed, including any post-release supervision period. An offender who received a custodial sentence of more than four years would then have to remain crime-free for an additional period of four years. That means that those offenders would have to avoid crime for more than eight years, and in some cases for a much longer period, before the provisions would apply to them. An offender who received a three-year sentence would have to stay out of trouble for a total of five years from the date of the sentence before his or her offence became spent. So for the more serious offences, offenders would have to avoid reoffending for very significant periods. Even then, the new provisions would not apply to jobs in sensitive occupations, for which they would still have to declare their full criminal record indefinitely. Less serious offenders who receive short sentences or non-custodial sentences would benefit from the Bill’s provisions after shorter periods, but even then, only when they were applying for a position which does not involve work with children or vulnerable people or other sensitive occupations. These are important safeguards, which I am sure the Minister will welcome.

Taken overall, the provisions of the Bill would further reduce the scope for unfair discrimination against ex-offenders in the job market. Regrettably, such discrimination is still widespread. Surveys of ex-offenders in Nacro projects—the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders—have shown that 60% have been explicitly refused jobs because of their criminal record. I declare my interest at this stage as the president of Nacro. Of course, it is sometimes reasonable to refuse an ex-offender a job because of his record. For example, we must obviously bar offenders with a history of offences against children from working with children. Equally obviously, we should bar offenders with a history of offences against elderly people from working with or caring for the elderly. The Bill would not apply to cases such as these as they are covered by the exceptions to the Act. However, in many cases employers often turn down applicants because of offences that have no relevance to the job for which they are applying.

Unfortunately, the scope for discrimination against ex-offenders is wide because decisions to employ or refuse people jobs are not made at the top of companies. They are made by large numbers of individual managers and personnel staff who have usually had no specific training in how to deal with applications from people with criminal records. Unfair discrimination against ex-offenders is wrong in principle because it imposes an additional illegitimate penalty of refusal of employment on people who have already served the judicially ordered punishment for their crime. It also reduces public safety because an ex-offender’s risk of reoffending is reduced by between one-third and one-half if he or she gets and keeps a job. The whole community benefits when offending is reduced, and reformed offenders are also helped to avoid returning to wasting their lives in criminal activity.

In conclusion, the Bill would enable more people with criminal records to start again with a clean slate after a period—in many cases a very long period—free from criminal activity. That is a worthy aim and I am delighted to support the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, in his efforts to achieve it.