News

Home Office using backdoor criminal records checks to vet its own staff

Mon, 28 Dec 2009

The Home Office and the Ministry of Justice are using the Scottish body that deals with criminal records to check on its employees in England and Wales because the Criminal Records Bureau cannot.

This is because it has yet to bring the equivalent powers into force in England and Wales, despite being on the statute book for over a decade. In the last year, 3,829 staff have been checked, according to research by the Liberal Democrats.

The figures, released in Parliamentary answers, show:

The Home Office made 3,324 criminal records checks on its staff in England and Wales using basic disclosure checks by Disclosure Scotland between October 2008 and November 2009. This included 1,084 permanent staff and 2,240 contractors
The Ministry of Justice checked 505 of its staff in the same period
Nearly 1.3m people in England and Wales were subject to basic disclosure checks by Disclosure Scotland between 2003 and 2008, at a rate of 4,163 a week or 595 a day

Commenting, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Huhne said:

“It shows that the Criminal Records Bureau in England and Wales is not up to scratch when the Home Office has to use the Scottish equivalent to vet its own staff.

“It is ridiculous that the Government is intending to introduce a vetting and barring scheme to check on millions more people when it still has not enacted criminal records legislation from a decade ago.

“It is simply not on to make employees in England and Wales be vetted by a Scottish body when there is no legislative basis for it.

“Ministers at the Home Office must come clean about why the Criminal Records Bureau is not deemed fit to carry out basic disclosure checks.

“It says a great deal about the Home Office’s tendency towards legislative diarrhoea that laws passed twelve years ago have not yet come into force.”