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For people with criminal records
For people with criminal records

Author: Unlock Admin

One conviction or multiple offences? The DBS filtering process

Ever since we published our Information Hub guide on the new DBS filtering process, our Helpline has been receiving queries left, right and centre about the filtering process and how it applies to them. It’s fair to say that, in lots of cases, it doesn’t help, because they have more than multiple convictions over many years, or received prison (or suspended) sentence.

One issue that seems to be quite common is where people believe themselves to have one conviction, only to find that, when they do a DBS check (or get a Police National Computer record) , they have a number of ‘offences’ on their record, all of which were dealt with at the same time in court. A common example is drink driving and driving without insurance. The court records this as one conviction, but would have two offences.

We’ve clarified this kind of example with the Home Office, who interpret this situation as meaning ‘multiple convictions’, meaning that none would be filtered from a DBS check.

This is something we’re looking at challenging, and as part of this, we’re keen to hear of people who may be affected by a similar kind of issue. The more examples we get, the better chance we have of finding a way of challenging this.

If this is something that affects you, please get in contact with our Helpline. If you have a copy of a DBS (or CRB) disclosure, or a copy of your PNC record, which shows this, please send this through too. All information is treated confidentially.

Scottish Government consult on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974

This week, the Scottish Government has (finally) launched its consultation on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.

England & Wales has passed its own reforms on this (although they’re still waiting to come into force), but these will not change the situation in Scotland.

The Scottish Government hasn’t put forward a specific proposal at this stage, which suggests a genuine openness to look at different ways of improving it.

Not only is this is a great opportunity to influence potential changes in Scotland, but it’s also a way of setting out arguments for why broader changes in approach may be needed, and how this may relate in the future to changes in England and Wales.

For information, when the UK Government published a consultation on amendments to England & Wales, Unlock submitted a response, which can be downloaded here.

We want to encourage anybody who has a view on the ROA in Scotland to respond to the consultation. All the details can be found on the Scottish Government website.

For anybody who wishes to their share contributions more broadly, we’re happy to circulate responses via this site – just send them through to therecord@outlook.com.

Our Helpline is now open 5 days a week

As a result of increased staff and voluntary resources available to our helpline, we’ve now been able to re-open our Helpline 5 days a week (it had previously been restricted to 2 days a week).

As always, as a small charity, it may not always be possible for us to answer your call immediately, as we may be dealing with other enquiries. You can always leave a message and we’ll call you back as soon as possible.

Generally, our open hours are Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.

If you would like to contact our helpline, our contact details are here.

New addition to the team

We’re delighted to announce that we have a new member of staff.

As many of you will know, we’ve had quite a few changes at Unlock recently. When we announced that Chris Bath was leaving us at the end of February, we committed to investing our resources into front-line staff. This ultimately resulted in the Services Coordinator vacancy, which we advertised from April, and for which we held interviews for in May. Given we were specifically looking somebody with a conviction, we were blown away by the quality of candidates that applied, which truly shows the skills and experiences that many people with convictions have.

As a result of this process, we appointed Debbie Sadler as our full-time Services Coordinator, and she started with us on the 18th June. You can find out more about her here.

Debbie’s primary role is to manage our Helpline, dealing with queries that come in by telephone, email and letter, providing accurate and reliable information to people about how to overcome the issues that a criminal record can cause when you’re trying to move on with your life.

Questions?

If you have any questions for Debbie, please contact her via our helpline.

DBS Update Service and One Certificate

Today, we’ve published a brief guide which explains some of the changes that the DBS has introduced this week.

The Update Service is a new subscription service lets you keep your DBS certificate up-to-date so you can take it with you when you move jobs or roles. The employer can then carry out free, online, instant checks to see if any new information has come to light since the certificate’s issue – this is called a ‘status check’.

To coincide with launching the Update Service, the DBS will now only issue certificates to you; they’ll no longer send a copy to the Registered Body. This change is being referred to as ‘One Certificate’. Employers will now need to ask you for sight of your DBS Certificate.

The guide we’ve put together discusses some of the issues and questions that people with convictions are likely to be interested in, including some of the benefits and potential downsides to these changes.

Read the guide we’ve published here.

Questions?

If you have any questions about this information, please contact us.

If you’d like to discuss this information with others, there is a specific thread on our online forum.

 

DBS Update Service and One Certificate

This is an update taken from our Information Hub

Today, we’ve published a brief guide which explains some of the changes that the DBS has introduced this week.

The Update Service is a new subscription service lets you keep your DBS certificate up-to-date so you can take it with you when you move jobs or roles. The employer can then carry out free, online, instant checks to see if any new information has come to light since the certificate’s issue – this is called a ‘status check’.

To coincide with launching the Update Service, the DBS will now only issue certificates to you; they’ll no longer send a copy to the Registered Body. This change is being referred to as ‘One Certificate’. Employers will now need to ask you for sight of your DBS Certificate.

The guide we’ve put together discusses some of the issues and questions that people with convictions are likely to be interested in, including some of the benefits and potential downsides to these changes.

Read the guide we’ve published here.

Questions?

If you have any questions about this information, please contact us.

If you’d like to discuss this information with others, there is a specific thread on our online forum.

Changes to insurance disclosure

The reason for this update is to let you know of some changes to insurance disclosure, which came into force in April 2013, which should help many people with convictions. We updated the guidance on our website at the time, but to raise awareness of this, we thought we’d send around an e-update as well!

For many years, people with convictions have found themselves in a difficult situation when purchasing insurance. This is because of archaic insurance law dating back to the Marine Insurance Act 1906, which imposed heavy duties on all consumers to disclose all material facts, even if the insurer didn’t ask about them specifically. If you failed to guess what the insurer wanted to know, your claim could be rejected.

In 2008, the Law Commission consulted on whether the law should be changed. Unlock made a submission which highlighted the problems that the law caused for people with convictions. Following this consultation, the Law Commission recommended a change in the law. Unlock, along with a number of other consumer organisations (including Age UK, Consumer Focus and Which?), worked hard to push the Government to change the law. This was successful in March 2012, when the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012 received Royal Assent.

The Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representation) Act 2012 came into force on 6th April 2013. It removes the duty on consumers to volunteer ‘material facts’ if about certain convictions (e.g. non-motoring convictions). Previously, you had to disclose all unspent criminal convictions, regardless of whether you were asked about them. This is no longer the case.
The onus now sits squarely with the insurer to ask you the questions that they want to know information about. Instead of a duty to volunteer material facts, now the law requires you to answer the questions that are put to you fully and accurately. You need to “take reasonable care”, and one of the factors that will be taken into account is whether the questions asked by the insurer were clear and specific.

For more information

We’ve published a guide on the changes to insurance disclosure. We’ve also updated our simple and detailed guides, as well as updating our list of insurance brokers and list of motor insurers. As always, all of this can be downloaded from the insurance section of our website.

Can you help us improve our lists?

Since these changes have come in, some insurers have changed the questions they ask. Some mainstream motor insurers, for example, have started asking about non-motoring convictions, meaning we’ve had to take them off our specific list of motor insurers that didn’t ask about non-motoring convictions.

However, there are many other insurers that ask quite specific questions about convictions (e.g. convictions in the last 5 years). For these insurers, even if your conviction is unspent, if it was after this period, you do not need to disclose.

As a result, we’re in the process of reviewing our list of motor insurers, to identify more mainstream companies that do not ask about certain convictions. We’re also looking to produce a similar list of home insurers, providing details of companies that ask quite specific questions. If you come across any specific insurers that you think should be included in either of these, please let us know by emailing the details to advice@unlock.org.uk.

Changes to insurance disclosure

The below is post from our Information Hub

The reason for this update is to let you know of some changes to insurance disclosure, which came into force in April 2013, which should help many people with convictions. We updated the guidance on our website at the time, but to raise awareness of this, we thought we’d send around an e-update as well!

For many years, people with convictions have found themselves in a difficult situation when purchasing insurance. This is because of archaic insurance law dating back to the Marine Insurance Act 1906, which imposed heavy duties on all consumers to disclose all material facts, even if the insurer didn’t ask about them specifically. If you failed to guess what the insurer wanted to know, your claim could be rejected.

In 2008, the Law Commission consulted on whether the law should be changed. Unlock made a submission which highlighted the problems that the law caused for people with convictions. Following this consultation, the Law Commission recommended a change in the law. Unlock, along with a number  of other consumer organisations (including Age UK, Consumer Focus and Which?), worked hard to push  the Government to change the law. This was successful in March 2012, when the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012 received Royal Assent.

The Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representation) Act 2012 came into force on 6th April 2013. It removes the duty on consumers to volunteer ‘material facts’ if not asked. The onus is now on the insurer to ask the right questions. For people with convictions, this will help to clarify the law when companies do not ask about certain convictions (e.g. non-motoring convictions). Previously, you had to disclose all unspent criminal convictions, regardless of whether you were asked about them. This is no longer the case.
The onus now sits squarely with the insurer to ask you the questions that they want to know information about. Instead of a duty to volunteer material facts, now the law requires you to answer the questions that are put to you fully and accurately. You need to “take reasonable care”, and one of the factors that will be taken into account is whether the questions asked by the insurer were clear and specific.

For more information

We’ve published a guide on the changes to insurance disclosure. We’ve also updated our simple and detailed guides, as well as updating our list of insurance brokers and list of motor insurers. As always, all of this can be downloaded from the insurance section of our website.

 

Can you help us improve our lists?

Since these changes have come in, some insurers have changed the questions they ask. Some mainstream motor insurers, for example, have started asking about non-motoring convictions, meaning we’ve had to take them off our specific list of motor insurers that didn’t ask about non-motoring convictions.

However, there are many other insurers that ask quite specific questions about convictions (e.g. convictions in the last 5 years). For these insurers, even if your conviction is unspent, if it was after this period, you do not need to disclose.

As a result, we’re in the process of reviewing our list of motor insurers, to identify more mainstream companies that do not ask about certain convictions. We’re also looking to produce a similar list of home insurers, providing details of companies that ask quite specific questions. If you come across any specific insurers that you think should be included in either of these, please let us know by emailing the details to advice@unlock.org.uk.

DBS start filtering cautions and convictions

As some of you may have seen from the news, the Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS) has started, as of yesterday, a process of ‘filtering’ for cautions and convictions held on the Police National Computer.

Today, we’ve published our own detailed guide on how the DBS filtering rules will work. This can be viewed here.

Although we’ve known this has been coming for quite a few weeks now, it wasn’t until last week that we found out exactly when it would be coming into force. It wasn’t until yesterday when, along with everybody else, we got a chance to see the guidance that the DBS had written and, in particular, saw the full list of offences that are exempt from filtering.

We’ve written a lot about this issue in recent years (see more here). Unfortunately, the filtering process that the Government has introduced doesn’t go far enough in lots of ways. However, based on the calls our Helpline has been receiving in the last couple of days, it is certainly going to help some people, and for those people, it could mean the difference between getting refused the role they’ve applied for, and finally getting an opportunity to prove themselves. We will continue to argue that the system should go much further, to ensure that genuinely law-abiding people with convictions are able to reach their potential.

In the meantime, after having chance to digest the DBS guidance, alongside the list of offences, and the numerous questions we’ve asked of Government in recent weeks, we’ve published a detailed guide on the DBS filtering process. We hope that this information will help you to understand whether the process will help you in your own situation; we’ve tried to put together a number of questions that should help, as well as frequently asked questions and some examples.

It is going to take some time for people to understand this process. In particular, it’s likely that employers will be confused about what it means for them and their recruitment. On top of many other changes being made to the DBS process, this represents an unprecedented level of uncertainty about how the DBS process operates. We will continue, as always, to try to help people with convictions better understand the system as best as we can.

If you have any questions about this information, please contact us.
If you’d like to discuss this information with others, there is a specific thread on our online forum.

DBS start filtering cautions and convictions

This update is taken from our Information Hub

As some of you may have seen from the news, the Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS) has started, as of yesterday, a process of ‘filtering’ for cautions and convictions held on the Police National Computer.

Today, we’ve published our own detailed guide on how the DBS filtering rules will work. This can be viewed here.

Although we’ve known this has been coming for quite a few weeks now, it wasn’t until last week that we found out exactly when it would be coming into force. It wasn’t until yesterday when, along with everybody else, we got a chance to see the guidance that the DBS had written and, in particular, saw the full list of offences that are exempt from filtering.

We’ve written a lot about this issue in recent years (see more here). Unfortunately, the filtering process that the Government has introduced doesn’t go far enough in lots of ways. However, based on the calls our Helpline has been receiving in the last couple of days, it is certainly going to help some people, and for those people, it could mean the difference between getting refused the role they’ve applied for, and finally getting an opportunity to prove themselves. We will continue to argue that the system should go much further, to ensure that genuinely law-abiding people with convictions are able to reach their potential.

In the meantime, after having chance to digest the DBS guidance, alongside the list of offences, and the numerous questions we’ve asked of Government in recent weeks, we’ve published a detailed guide on the DBS filtering process. We hope that this information will help you to understand whether the process will help you in your own situation; we’ve tried to put together a number of questions that should help, as well as frequently asked questions and some examples.

It is going to take some time for people to understand this process. In particular, it’s likely that employers will be confused about what it means for them and their recruitment. On top of many other changes being made to the DBS process, this represents an unprecedented level of uncertainty about how the DBS process operates. We will continue, as always, to try to help people with convictions better understand the system as best as we can.

If you have any questions about this information, please contact us.

If you’d like to discuss this information with others, there is a specific thread on our online forum.

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