My Lords, this has been a short, very well informed and powerful debate. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Sharkey and others for all they have done relating to Alan Turing and to the amendment to the Protection of Freedoms Act. That Act reflected the Government’s determination that people’s lives should not be unfairly blighted by historical convictions for consensual gay sex with people aged over 16. The House is grateful too to my noble friend Lord Lexden for his usual accurate and illuminating historical analysis of the origins of this sad state of affairs, which gave rise to so many convictions and caused so much unhappiness.
A disregard results in a person’s relevant convictions being removed from the records held by the police and the courts. Those convictions will therefore no longer
appear on a criminal records check and the individual never has to declare them, in any circumstances. However—this is where the amendment is concerned—where someone has died, the intended effect of these provisions would apply. The provisions in the Protection of Freedoms Act are designed to help living individuals get on with their lives free of the stigma of the disregarded offence. I fully appreciate and sympathise with the intention behind the amendment, but the Government are concerned that there would not be a practical benefit to the change. A disregard would not allow the applicant, on behalf of a deceased person, to say that the deceased person was incorrectly convicted, nor that he or she has received a pardon. It is important to remember the rationale that lies behind this. The objective of the Protection of Freedoms Act, in disregarding certain offences, is that they should no longer affect a person’s life or career. The intention is to support living people who are disadvantaged when they apply for work, rather than to set the record straight.
The Government are still concerned that such an amendment would introduce a disproportionate burden on public resources; reference was made to a similar answer given from the Dispatch Box, not by me but by another Minister. For living people, the Protection of Freedoms Act will amend the data used for criminal records checks for living people. When someone is deceased, the offence is more likely to have taken place prior to the establishment of the National Policing Improvement Agency’s names database. Identifying appropriate records would be a lengthy, expensive and uncertain task. There is less certainty that any records can be identified, and those that are found may be insufficient to be sure that offences were consensual and with a person aged over 16.
The Government are concerned this would place a disproportionate burden on existing resources at the Home Office and on the police service. My noble friend Lord Sharkey referred to the answer he was given by a Home Office Minister to a question about the number of people who had made applications, following the estimate of 16,000. I am told that it is true it has now risen to 192 from 185. However, noble Lords will appreciate that departments are operating under severe financial restrictions. While we believe that the cost of dealing with applications from those whose lives continue to be affected is justified in the current climate, we cannot agree that costs, which we believe will be significantly higher for each application, could be justified in trying to deal with the records of those who have died. In our view, the limited resources should be directed at those who continue to have difficulties as a result of their conviction or caution for these offences. I need hardly stress that there is a difference between a pardon and a disregard.
The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, made an interesting, bold suggestion. He rightly predicted that I was unlikely to swallow the suggestion from the Dispatch Box, sincerely though it was made. My initial reaction is that, if there were to be a blanket amnesty, as I think he was proposing, we would need to go through this case by case to establish whether this act was consensual and therefore within the scope of the Act.
Therefore, while having considerable sympathy with all that lies behind the amendment, the Government are still not in a position to accept it as tabled by my noble friend Lord Sharkey. However, I appreciate that there is a feeling that something ought to be done to right a historic injustice. I can certainly—without, I hope, raising any expectations—at least agree to facilitate a meeting with the Minister to discuss this matter further. However, I emphasise that I cannot raise expectations and the position at the moment is precisely as I have outlined it. In those circumstances, notwithstanding the arguments that have been put forward, I hope that my noble friend will be prepared to withdraw his amendment.