Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I declare an interest as president of Nacro, the crime reduction charity. I want it to be noted that my association with it is entirely voluntary. The purpose of my Bill is to enact a series of changes to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 which the Government announced they would implement in April 2003. When I initiated a debate on this subject on 6 December 2006, these proposals received all-party support. I was pleased when the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, responding from the Conservative Front Bench, said: ""In the current climate of crisis in our prison service, I would have thought that cutting the numbers that reoffend would make a significant difference to an already over-stretched system".—[Official Report, 6/12/06; col. 1233.]" I hope that the same all-party support will be given on this occasion. The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 provided that after specified rehabilitation periods, ex-offenders do not have to declare spent convictions when they apply for jobs except in sensitive areas of work such as criminal justice agencies, financial institutions and work with young people or vulnerable adults. Since it was enacted in 1974, it has helped many ex-offenders to live down their past. However, the rehabilitation periods laid down in it are lengthy, and many genuinely reformed ex-offenders can never benefit from it. If an offender is given a three-month prison sentence, the offence takes seven years to become spent. If he or she gets a nine-month sentence, the offence does not become spent until 10 years later. Sentences of more than two and a half years can never become spent. These provisions are noticeably less generous than the rules that apply in other European countries. Those countries typically apply the rehabilitation periods to sentences that are longer than two and a half years. Their rehabilitation periods are also much shorter; they are often half the length of ours, or in many cases less than that. Since the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 was implemented, every length of sentence has significantly increased. Many offenders who would have received sentences of two and a half years or less back in 1974 receive sentences of between three and four years today. This means that many people who would previously have been helped by the Act now find that their offences will never become spent during their lifetime. In 2001, the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, set up a review group to examine whether, three decades after the Act’s implementation, there was a case for reform. The review group was chaired by a senior Home Office official and included representatives of the police and probation services, the legal profession, the judiciary, employers, voluntary agencies and ex-offenders. In 2002, the review group published its conclusions in its report Breaking the Circle. Following a consultation period, the Government published their own conclusions in April 2003, and accepted a modified version of the review group’s proposals. Under that version, the current rehabilitation periods would be replaced by new buffer periods, which would begin after the sentence, including any post-release supervision, was completed. The buffer periods would be four years for custodial sentences of four years or more, two years for custodial sentences of less than four years, and one year for non-custodial sentences. These periods would apply to all offences except those that resulted in a life sentence. Sentencing courts would have the discretion to disapply these provisions in any case in which the sentencer decided that there was a particular risk. The new provisions would not apply to jobs in sensitive occupations, for which applicants would still have to declare their full criminal record. These are the proposals in my Bill. A reformed system along these lines would greatly reduce the scope for unfair discrimination against ex-offenders in the job market. Regrettably, such discrimination is still widespread. A survey of ex-offenders in the projects in which the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders is involved demonstrates that 60 per cent have been explicitly refused jobs because of their criminal records. Of course, it is sometimes reasonable to refuse an ex-offender a job because of his record. For example, you must obviously bar offenders with a history of offences against children from working with children, and offenders with a history of defrauding older people from work caring for older people. In many cases, however, employers are turning down applications because of offences that have no relevance whatever to the jobs for which they are applying. The scope of discrimination is potentially wide because the decisions to employ or refuse people jobs are not made at the top of companies. They are made by a large number of individual managers who have usually had no specific training in how to deal with applications from people with criminal records. A large-scale research study undertaken by the Joseph Rowntree Trust found that no private sector employers in the sample, and only one in seven public sector employers, had provided specific training on this point to start making recruitment decisions. At the time when the review group was set up, there was particular concern that discrimination could increase when Part 5 of the Police Act 1997 was fully implemented. That legislation is likely to be implemented in the near future. It will enable employers to require any job applicant for any job, not just one of the sensitive occupations, to produce a basic disclosure certificate from the Criminal Records Bureau listing his or her unspent criminal conviction. Research by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has found that if this provision were implemented, employers would be likely to reject people with criminal records for their vacancies and to reject those with more serious convictions for 90 per cent of their vacancies. That research has concluded that the introduction of basic disclosure certificates was likely severely to reduce employment opportunities for those with past criminal records. My Bill would help to reduce the risk of an increase in such widespread and unfair discrimination by shortening the periods after which convictions became spent. That would reduce the number of old offences that would appear on basic disclosure certificates. The case for reform of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act would be a powerful one, whether or not the basic disclosure provisions of the Police Act were implemented; it would be powerful on the basis of the discrimination that is already there against ex-offenders. 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. Recently, when the Bill was published, a number of ex-offenders wrote to me. I shall quote from a letter from an individual whom I do not wish to name: ""I am an ex-offender who committed a single criminal act at the age of 18 whilst in the grip of an addiction to gambling, for which I was sentenced to three years in a young offender institution. At the time I thought the loss of my liberty and my chosen career was the greatest punishment but I was so wrong. Having to live in fear at every job interview that I will be asked ‘the’ question has hung over me like a cloud since the day I was released over 21 years ago, even leading to bouts of depression"." The reforms to which the Government committed themselves in 2003 would allow many people who committed offences many years ago to start again with a clean slate. They would therefore reduce the risk of further offending by former offenders who are excluded from the job market. In conclusion, I thank the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, who responded to my earlier debate. She said: ""I will note with pleasure in my diary that this is something about which there is unanimity in this House. Therefore, we can all go joyfully to the Whips who, I am sure, will find a space".—[Official Report, 6/12/06; col. 1238.]" I hope that noble Lords of all parties will support this modest and long overdue reform. In conclusion, I should like to thank also my researcher, Paul Cavadino, and the Bill Office for their help in drafting this Bill. I beg to move.