Type: Unlock General

Survey about the new forum

Many thanks to everybody that responded to our forum survey.

The winner of the £25 Amazon voucher was randomly selected and has asked that the £25 goes to a charity of Unlock’s choosing.

The results have been extremely helpful with many responses being really positive about what is currently available. However, some members felt that the forum needed to be more user friendly, especially for people who are not so computer literate.

This feedback will be hugely helpful to us as we continue to develop an improved forum.

We hope to provide a further update on progress later this year.

Are you a providing probation services? New 2-day criminal record disclosure training course

We’re excited to announce the details of a new a two-day training course, ‘Supporting with Conviction’, designed specifically for probation providers, staff in Community Rehabilitation Companies, and specialists helping people with convictions to get into employment.

At a time when probation provision is going through significant change, both in terms of structure and people, it’s critically important that those responsible for supporting people with convictions have the confidence, knowledge and skills to advise and support their clients on the dealing with the impact of their criminal record.

This ‘Supporting with Conviction’ course builds on the success of Unlock’s one-day training, which we’ve delivered to over 400 practitioners in the last 18 months. Our new two-day course has been specifically designed to meet the needs of probation providers, CRC’s, and other specialist practitioners such as Work Programme advisors.

Christopher Stacey, Co-Director at Unlock said “The recent changes to probation provision present a unique opportunity to ensure that the advice and support provided to people with convictions, both before release from prison and in the community, is of a genuinely high standard.”

“I know from the training courses that we run that there is a huge gap in the knowledge, awareness and understanding amongst those very people who are the primary source of support for people with convictions shortly after their conviction. That’s why we believe this type of training is so important.

“We are particularly keen to work with probation providers to ensure that their staff and practitioners working in a client-facing role have high-quality training on advising and supporting their clients on criminal records, the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, disclosing to employers and criminal record checks.”

“It’s clear from the feedback that we get that there’s a demand for more time and detail than what we offer in our one-day course, so this is our response. The two-day course is designed as a comprehensive training package covering all important areas of criminal record disclosure as it relates to people with a criminal record. Split over two days, the course allows plenty of time for discussion and practical exercises. It also allows for attendees to reflect on the complexities of the law around disclosure, which are covered in the first day.”

“We’re looking forward to working with a range of organisations to genuinely improve the advice and support that people with convictions receive.”

To find out more about this training:

More details about the course are on our website.
To arrange to run an in-house course for your organisation.
If you have any questions about this course, or our support for practitioners more generally, please contact Debbie Young. Call 01622 230705 or email admin@unlock.org.uk.

Notes

Unlock is an independent advocacy charity for people with convictions. As an organisation that doesn’t take government funding to deliver services, it was clear to us that our role in probation services would be one that supports those organisations that deliver services on the ground. This builds on our track record of providing accurate and reliable advice and support to people with convictions, while working at a policy level to push for a fairer and more inclusive society.
There’s more information about our training on our website
You can find out more general information about our support for providers of probation at unlock.devchd.com/probation
Alongside this exciting development, we continue to run our ever-popular one-day ‘Advising with Conviction’ training – dates for 2016 will be announced in the coming months.

Summer 2015 Newsletter

Today we’ve published our Summer Newsletter.

The newsletter provides an update of the news at Unlock in the last three months. It’s sent to everyone who’s on our public mailing list, and we hope it’s a useful way of keeping up to date with what we’ve been up to.

Download the Summer 2015 Newsletter.

You can receive our newsletters direct to your inbox by signing up to our mailing list here.

Volunteer Vacancy – Helpline Advisor

We’ve got a volunteer vacancy on our Helpline.

More details can be found here.

Help us improve our online forum

Now that it’s 7 years old, we are working on giving our forum a bit of an update and we want to hear from people with convictions about what an updated forum would look like, and how it would work.

Complete the survey here

Find out more about this work by reading a longer update we’ve posted on our information site.

Help us to challenge employment discrimination

Work is progressing well to lay the foundations for our project to challenge employment discrimination. We’re now at the stage where we want to start opening out the conversation, to help to shape the project.

This update is the first of what we hope will be an ongoing conversation – with employers, with people with convictions, and with others who have an interest in ensuring that employers have fair and inclusive policies and procedures that support the recruitment of people with convictions.

There’s a number of things we’re working on, and we’re keen to get your input.

Help us develop good practice and resources for employers
Send us evidence of bad practice
How would you like to be treated when applying for work?

Help us develop good practice and resources for employers

One of the key focuses of the project is to support employers in developing good policies and practices. One way we’re going about this by developing a resource centre specifically for employers.

So, we’re going back to basics. We want to make sure that we support employers who choose to consider criminal records by helping them to do so in a way that is fair, inclusive and lawful. However, we also want to challenge the inappropriate use of criminal records and to question the assumption amongst some employers that criminal records checks should always form part of their recruitment process in all circumstances.

To help us do this, we want to know what you think ‘good practice’ looks like.

We’re keen to get the thoughts of a range of people. We’re particularly keen to hear from employers about what you would find useful in helping you in this process. We’re keen to highlight the different ways that employers have tried to make themselves more open and inclusive towards people with convictions. We’re also looking for suggestions of existing resources that you’ve found useful.

We’ve put together a short set of questions, and we’d be grateful if you could spare a few minutes to share your thoughts (you can stay anonymous if you wish).

Complete the online survey here.

Alternatively, you can read the questions here and email your answers and other thoughts on this topic to employer@unlock.org.uk.

Send us evidence of bad practice

Alongside our work to support employers to develop good practice, we’re also on the look-out for evidence of bad practice by employers with regards to the policies and processes that they have in place for job applicants with criminal records.

This could include employers that:

Have a blanket policy of not recruiting anybody with unspent convictions
Carry out DBS checks for roles not eligible for them
Request applicants to provide a copy of their ‘police record’ (also known as ‘enforced subject access’)
Don’t give applicants an opportunity to explain their criminal record

Find out more details here about how to send us examples and evidence of bad practice.

How would you like to be treated when applying for work?

Alongside our survey of employers, we’re also keen to hear from people with convictions about how they’d like to be treated when applying for work.

In particular, we’d like to know what you think is a ‘fair’ way of dealing with criminal records as part of the recruitment process.

To do this we’ve put together a short survey for people with convictions.

You can complete the survey online survey here (you can stay anonymous if you wish).

Alternatively, you can read the questions here and email your answers to employer@unlock.org.uk.

Interesting in keeping updated about this work?

You can subscribe to receive these types of updates by email by signing up to our email updates and choosing to receive ‘News on our work challenging employment discrimination’.

RBS Magazine article – Unlocking a better future

RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) have published an article in their ‘Outside In’ magazine, which explains the work that Unlock did with RBS to open up access to basic bank accounts for people in prison before release.

You can read the article here.

Latest updates to our self-help information site – May 2015

We’ve published a summary of the recent updates we’ve made to our Information Hub in May.

You can read the summary on our Hub here.

The Justice priorities of Unlock

Christopher Stacey has written a piece for Russell Webster’s blog, which has been published today. We have provided a copy of the text below. The original is available here.

Christopher Stacey, Co-Director at Unlock – for people with convictions, is the latest to set out his top three priorities for the new Justice Secretary Michael Gove. You can follow @unlockcharity

1 MAKE FURTHER CHANGES TO WHEN CONVICTIONS BECOME SPENT

Reforms in 2014 to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act made a huge difference to thousands of people with convictions. However, they don’t go far enough. I would establish a system that involves an individual case assessment, which enables people sentenced to more than 4 years in prison to demonstrate how they’ve rehabilitated in the community, allowing their convictions to become spent.

A similar system would be open to those who have not yet reached the time-limit required by law. I’d also clean up the many technical anomalies with the current law which came about as a result of the reforms, such as how motoring convictions have a default 5 year rehabilitation period, and the ridiculous way that ‘ancillary’ court orders often lengthen the rehabilitation period for a particular conviction.

2 ESTABLISH A ‘WIPE THE SLATE CLEAN’ POLICY

As things stand, a criminal record is for life, no matter how old or minor. This is despite knowing that, in particular, young people make mistakes when they’re young. In essence, young people should be allowed to fail. Ways to properly and fully ‘wipe the slate clean’ for minor offending should be established.

Recent measures to ‘filter’ minor disposals for certain types of employment checks are limited and only came about due to legal challenges. I would establish a system that makes sure old and minor convictions and cautions are not disclosed on criminal record checks. This would apply to multiple convictions, more offence categories than currently covered by filtering, and would apply to prison sentences too.

3 LEAD FROM THE FRONT BY ‘BANNING THE BOX’ ACROSS GOVERNMENT

Alongside changes in government policy, there’s a role for more proactive and positive business practice when dealing with the recruitment of people with a criminal record. For example, the ‘Ban the Box’ initiative aims to deal with a common problem amongst mainstream employers – the use of ‘tick boxes’ about convictions on application forms as a way of determining an applicants’ suitability.

The approach of this initiative enables people with convictions to put themselves forward first and foremost on an equal playing field and competing for jobs on their skills and merit. Early indications show the potential for such positive practice to be adopted as a matter of routine, and I would work to embed this into recruitment practice across all Government departments and agencies. I would also look to follow the US example by looking to write this kind of practice into employment law.

‘Right to be forgotten’ – One year on

The Telegraph has published an article which looks at the impact of the ‘right to be forgotten’ 12 months on from the original court decision. Interesting extracts can be found below, but the full article is available here.

Since then, Google claims to have processed 253,617 requests to remove 920,258 links, and approved just over 40 per cent of those requests. In the UK alone, the company has received 32,076 requests to remove 126,571 links, and approved 37.5 per cent.

Examples of removal requests include:

A man requesting the removal of a link to a news summary of a local magistrate’s decisions that included the man’s guilty verdict. Under the UK Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, his conviction has been spent (approved)

In Britain, 183 people have reportedly complained to the UK’s data protection watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), after Google denied their requests to remove links.

The ICO has agreed with Google’s conclusions in around three quarters of these cases, but there are 48 cases where the ICO believes Google “hasn’t got it quite right”.

Google has been asked to review these cases, and in many cases has reversed its decision, according to the ICO. However, the search company faces possible legal action from the ICO if the remaining cases are not resolved.

“We’ll be looking to resolve the remaining cases through discussion and negotiation with Google, though we have enforcement powers available to us if required,” said ICO deputy commissioner and director of data protection, David Smith.

“The European ruling is about providing individuals with a suitable mechanism for getting information which is no longer accurate or relevant to be removed from a search engine’s results page. If there is a clear public interest in the information remaining available then it will stay there as many complainants to our office have discovered.”