Disclosure of Youth Criminal Records

Theresa Villiers Excerpts

Thursday 28th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the First Report of the Justice Committee, Disclosure of youth criminal records, HC 416, and the Government response, Cm 9559.

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I thank the House for giving us the opportunity to debate the report, and my friends and colleagues on the Select Committee on Justice who contributed to it. I am glad to see such a good turnout when other things are happening today as well.

This is an important issue, and not merely a technical one. Although some of the law and regulations around it are complex, we have concluded that it directly affects people’s lives and that the current state of our arrangements is frankly unsatisfactory and unfit for purpose. The gist of what we say is that change is needed, and so far we detect a lack of urgency in addressing that. As a consequence, injustice and, frankly, social harm are being done by the failure to modernise a system that has not kept pace with developments in a number of areas.

I will first address the background to our report. In October 2016, the Justice Committee in the previous Parliament decided to launch an inquiry into disclosure of youth criminal records, partly as a follow-up to the inquiry that we had conducted on the treatment of young adults in the criminal justice system, a substantial report in itself, and partly because of a number of representations that we had received from the non-governmental organisation sector. I refer particularly to the evidence that has been given to us by Unlock and the Standing Committee for Youth Justice, and pay tribute to the work that those organisations do in this field.

In consequence, we had an inquiry in which we took oral and written evidence, but we also held a private seminar with individuals who had been personally affected by this problem. I think many policy makers would benefit from seeing and hearing from those people face to face about the real effects of the system upon them. They were able to talk about the effect on them of their childhood offences—that is the point, as we are often not talking about recent offences, but offences committed when people were children—being disclosed when they were adults, often some time down the track.

One of the many unforeseen consequences of the dissolution of Parliament in May 2017 was that the Committee was unable to produce its report, so one of our first decisions in this Parliament was to revisit it and produce an updated report on what we regard as an important issue, basing it on the evidence that our predecessor Committee had already heard. We published a report on 27 October 2017.

Having set out the chronology, let me give an overview of the background to the system. The criminal records disclosure regime, as I am sure many hon. Members know, is operated by the Disclosure and Barring Service, or DBS. For certain professional jobs, and certainly for work involving contact with children or vulnerable adults, the DBS has, for perfectly good reasons, to provide a standard or enhanced disclosure certificate, which can disclose all criminal records. That includes criminal records that otherwise would be regarded as spent.

There is a so-called filtering system, which allows some spent criminal records to be filtered out of disclosure so that they will not be revealed on the standard or enhanced DBS certificates. The idea behind the filtering system was that it was supposed to allow the disclosure regime to operate in a more proportionate manner, but the evidence that we have heard drives us to the conclusion that, in practice, the filtering system incorporates some significant exceptions, meaning that many offences are not filterable throughout the lifetime of an offender.

[Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that the UK system for disclosure of childhood criminal records is among the harshest in the world when compared with equivalent developed countries? Although I am a believer in a firm justice system that punishes crimes appropriately, I do not think it is fair for people to have to live for the rest of their lives with the consequences of terrible mistakes they may have made in childhood.

[Robert Neill]

I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend; that is precisely the problem. The disclosure system is an immensely blunt instrument and forgets that, as well as being a punishment, any sensible criminal justice system must encourage reform and rehabilitation. Whatever the no doubt good intentions behind it, the way the system operates is counterproductive in that regard.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am hugely grateful to the Justice Committee for this excellent work and the way in which the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) outlined the importance of this area.

My concern with criminal records arose from the review that I did for the Government on the disproportionality of black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals within the criminal justice system. When I began that work, I did not really understand the effect that our criminal records regime was having on disproportionality.

It is important to fully understand that while this is an issue for all young people, whatever their backgrounds in the criminal justice system, we also know—following work done by the Department for Work and Pensions over the past two decades and a range of other research—that we are unfortunately still living in a society where people from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds have a penalty in the public sphere, in relation to employment. That penalty, unfortunately, is that there are still aspects of discrimination when ethnic minorities apply for employment, particularly for those who have a criminal record.

That is why this issue came under the purview of the report that I was asked to do by the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, and that I was pleased to present to Theresa May when she took over as Prime Minister. It is important to emphasise that I conducted that review in a cross-party spirit, as did the advisers to the review. I am pleased that the issue of disproportionality in our criminal justice system remains an issue that concerns all political parties in this House. It is above the day to day of politics.

Reoffending is estimated to cost the taxpayer between £9.5 billion and £13 billion per year. A third of those on jobseeker’s allowance in our country have previous convictions. We note very sadly that recidivism rates among black men in our country are the highest in the system, with 45% going on to reoffend within two years. That is extremely concerning.

However, this issue really came across to me when I met the Trident team of police officers in the Metropolitan police, who deal with gang violence day to day. They were the ones who said to me, “Could you put this into your review? We are aware of a group of offenders who reach about 25 or 26 years old and want to move away from their criminal past but continue to reoffend because, as they grow up, they cannot get a job due to the regime that we have.” That testimony of police officers dealing with those young men day to day persuaded me that this cohort get trapped into a life of crime at the point at which they want to get out of it.

I therefore did some further research. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a quite well known child psychologist on Radio 4, Professor Peter Jones, Dr Aamodt and many others have now established that the brain continues developing well into a person’s 20s before it concludes—perhaps not concludes, because I hope we are all still learning. It is now understood that adulthood really kicks in somewhere between 25 and 30, so for all those reasons it is important to think about the age of maturity.

[Theresa Villiers]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that there is medical evidence that, up to the age of about 25, the brain’s development indicates that young men in particular are prone to an inappropriate attitude to risk? The research is clear about that, which reflects the experience of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) with the criminal justice system. That is another reason that we should frame disclosure rules on youth criminal records differently from those related to offences committed later in life.