---

Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974: Reform

rose to ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will bring forward legislation to reform the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. The noble Lord said: My Lords, first, I thank my noble friend Lord Addington and the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, for putting down their names to speak in this short debate. Dealing with matters affecting offenders is not a very popular cause. There are no thanks but, in a civilised society, we must never be afraid to raise our concerns. There are some shocking statistics. More than65 per cent of those released reoffend within two years. One of the most important factors in the rehabilitation process is the ability to hold on to a job. The question is: are we doing enough to achieve that objective? Look at our prisons. They are bursting at the seams. The statutory and voluntary organisations are trying hard to hold the tide. It is the duty of the Government to help in that task. Nowhere is that more important than in the ability of offenders to secure and hold a job. In April 2003, the Government announced plans for reform of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, but since then there has been no sign of legislation coming before Parliament to implement that promised reform. The purpose of this debate is to reinforce the importance of reforming the Act and to press the Government to do so at the earliest practicable date. I do so because I have searched high and low for this subject to appear in the gracious Speech, but alas, despite the Government's emphasis on rehabilitation, nothing seems to have materialised. The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 provided that, after specified rehabilitation periods, ex-offenders do not have to declare spent convictions when they are applying for jobs. Let me spell out exceptions, in case someone thinks that this is a blanket provision. Sensitive areas of work, such as such as criminal justice agencies, financial institutions and work with young people or vulnerable adults are excluded. Since it was enacted, the Act has helped many ex-offenders to live down their past. What are the facts? More than 30 years after the Act was passed, what do we find? The rehabilitation periods laid down in the Act are lengthy and many genuinely reformed ex-offenders never benefit from it. That is the experience of many agencies involved in rehabilitation work—my organisation, the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, is no exception. In fact, we find that it hinders our work in those areas. For example, if an offender is fined, the offence becomes spent after five years from the date of sentence. 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 until10 years later. Sentences of more than two-and-a-half years never become spent. Those provisions are notably less generous than the rules that apply in other European nations. Those countries typically apply rehabilitation periods to sentences longer than two-and-a-half years and their rehabilitation periods are much shorter, often half the length of ours or, possibly, less. Since the Act was implemented, sentence lengths have significantly increased. Many offenders who would have received sentences of two-and-a-half years or less back in 1974 are receiving sentences of between three and four years today. That means that many offenders who would previously have been helped by the Act now find that their offences will never become spent during the whole of their lifetime. That is wrong. Many ex-offenders spend a purposeful life without recourse to crime. If they did not, we would not have enough prisons to hold them. Surely there must be a more constructive way of dealing with the issue. 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 it included representatives of the police and probation services, the legal profession, the judiciary, employers, voluntary agencies and ex-offenders. My organisation, NACRO, gave evidence to the group. In 2002, the review group published its conclusions in the report entitled Breaking the Circle. Following a consultation period, the Government published their conclusions in April 2003. The Government accepted a modified version of the review group's proposals. Under the modified version accepted by the Government, the current rehabilitation periods would be replaced by new buffer periods which wouldbegin 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. Those periods would apply to all offences except those which resulted in a life sentence. Sentencing courts would have discretion to disapply these provisions in any case where the sentencer decided that there was a particular risk. Again, I stress that the new provision would not apply to jobs in sensitive occupations, for which applicants would still have to declare their full criminal record. A reformed system on those lines would greatly reduce the scope for unfair discrimination against ex-offenders, especially in the job market. Regrettably, such discrimination is still widespread. Surveys of ex-offenders in some projects undertaken by NACRO have shown 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, we must obviously bar offenders with a history of offences against children from working with children. We should bar offenders with a history of defrauding elderly people from working or caring for elderly people. In many cases, however, employers are turning down applications because of offences that are not relevant to the job, and there is no particular way of examining what precisely has happened in all these instances. The unemployment rates among black and minority ethnic young people may be of interest to the Minister. Evidence points to the fact that black and minority ethnic young people are twice as likely to be unemployed compared with their white counterparts. Fifteen to 17 per cent of people in our penal institutions are black, while black people are only 7 per cent of the community. I am not here to argue about how we created this anomaly. Nor am I going to argue about whether the criminal justice system has treated them fairly. I simply want the Minister to reflect on the fact that many will come out of prisons, but their conviction record will not help them; indeed, it will put them at a great disadvantage. Surely this does not assist the process of rehabilitation, which is one of the objectives of our prison service. The scope of discrimination is indeed very wide, because the decisions to employ or to refuse people jobs are taken not by people at the top of companies but by managers and personnel staff, many of whom have no specific training in how to deal with applications from people with criminal records. A large-scale research study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that no private sector employers in its sample, and only one in seven public sector employers, provided specific training on this point to staff taking recruitment decisions. When the review group was set up, there was a particular concern that discrimination could increase when Part 5 of the Police Act 1997 was fully implemented. So far, this legislation has not been fully implemented. If it were, it would enable employers to require any job applicant applying for any job, not only for one of the sensitive occupations, to produce a basic disclosure certificate from the Criminal Records Bureau listing his or her unspent criminal convictions. Government-commissioned 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 half their vacancies and to reject those with more serious convictions for 90 per cent of their vacancies. The researchers concluded that the introductionof basic disclosure was likely severely to reduce employment opportunities for people with criminal records. It is unclear when or whether the Government will implement this part of the Police Act 1997. I must stress, however, that the case for reform of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act remains powerful, whether or not the basic disclosure provisions of the Police Act are implemented. It is powerful because of the extent of discrimination that already exists. Unfair discrimination against ex-offenders is wrong in principle because it imposes an additional illegitimate penalty of the 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 re-offending is reduced by between a third and a half if he or she gets and keeps a job. The whole community benefitswhen offending is reduced, but employers benefit in particular because crimes such as cheque andcredit card fraud, shoplifting and the burglary of commercial premises have a particularly damaging impact on their businesses. In conclusion, the reforms to which the Government committed themselves in 2003 would allow many more people with criminal records to start again with a clean slate. They would thereby reduce the risk of further offending by former offenders excluded from the job market. I urge the Minister to restate the Government’s commitment to implement these changes, and to do so urgently.