News

The Bichard Inquiry opened its deliberations on 13 January, and will examine how convicted child killer Ian Huntley managed to get a job working with children when information was already available to suggest he was unsuitable.

In particular the inquiry is looking at how Humberside and Cambridge police handled the "soft" information available to them which could have informed those considering employing Huntley. Employers of people having access to children use "hard" criminal records and cautions to ratify appointments but they are also allowed to see soft non-conviction information such as allegations.

The nature of soft information has always been contentious. What it is and how it is used in employment screening has never really been the subject of any public debate. In the past it has been criticised for being irrelevant and preventing perfectly good candidates from getting jobs - in the Huntley case it was the other way round. Chairperson Sir Michael Bichard - a former local authority chief executive - is investigating the period from 1995 to the time of Huntley's appointment in 2001. These were before the days of the Criminal Records Bureau when police checks were local arrangements with local police forces carried out in accordance with Home Office circulars.

Two circulars were issued on the same day in 1986 when police checks on child care workers first started. One went to local authorities, and made no mention of the fact that non-conviction information could be disclosed. The other went to the police and advised them that such information could be disclosed.

Who exactly decided that soft information could be passed to employers is uncertain. The 1985 Home Office/Department of Health and Social Security working party that had reported on how police checks could best be introduced made no mention of the idea of releasing soft information.

A second circular to local authorities in 1988 formally told them about the availability of soft information which the Home Office now called "other relevant information". In practice local authorities must have known about it, because they had been receiving it for two years with the police acting on their 1986 circular.

The Home Office now described "other relevant information" as "factual information which the police would be prepared to present as evidence in court, or details of acquittals or decisions not to prosecute where the circumstances of the case would give cause for concern".

This was still the wording in a third Home Office circular in 1993. This circular was the operative guidance during Huntley's recruitment and selection in 2001.

The nature of soft information has never been fully researched. Examples of it have surfaced from time to time, and included:

• Child abuse charges dropped because of technical reasons, for example a child too young to give evidence.
• Someone owning property known to be used by drug dealers and users.
• Someone known to associate with other sex offenders.
• Someone abused as a child and therefore - by police reasoning - likely to become an abuser themselves.¹

What discussions there have been on the subject - and they have been few and far between - have raised issues of civil liberties and the fact that people are innocent until proved guilty.

The use of soft as well as hard information is part of a wider trend that increasingly sees no need to distinguish criminal activities from non-criminal activities, a view summed up as: "We know you did it - even if the court acquitted you". Clearly, some acquittals are better than others.

When the sex offender register was being devised we saw at least one child care organisation lobbying - unsuccessfully - to have not just the convicted on the register, but also suspects. We have seen the confusion of criminal activity with the ill-defined category of antisocial behaviour, which inevitably includes some non-criminal behaviour, and we have seen the imprisonment of women for murdering their children based on the word of experts rather than substantive evidence.

In 1990 the House of Commons home affairs select committee recommended that the disclosure of soft information should stop; in fact nothing changed. The consensus appeared to be that common sense should prevail and as long as the information was handled sensitively everything would be all right.

If anything, decision-making in this area got more cautious in the middle to late 1990s as anxiety levels about abuse in the workplace rose steadily. Some wondered if this was child protection coming to the fore, or organisation protection.

The Police Act 1997 which ultimately led in 2002 to the Criminal Records Bureau partially took screening out of the shadowy world of circulars and put it on a statutory basis. "Other relevant information" now got renamed as "Additional" or "Approved" information. It was still going to be held locally - because that's where the police need it - and the CRB would expect to receive it from local forces on request, for use with the enhanced checks needed for child care posts.

What remains in the shadows is the use that social services departments and other agencies - as employers - make of soft information when they are in receipt of it. How are decisions made to link the soft information to the post that needs filling? What sort of risk assessment is being made relating the work role to the reported behaviour? The fear is that no link is being made and decisions are made more on the lines of "don't like the look of this - better not take any chances", rather than any attempt at a considered proportionate response.

Formal policies on how decisions should be made on the basis of soft information - and indeed criminal records themselves - are conspicuous by their absence and just a change in the decision-making personnel can lead to variation from hard-line to liberal or vice versa.²

The fact that these decisions are of low visibility and made behind closed doors only increases the sense of there being no real accountability here, as well as no meaningful form of redress for an aggrieved applicant.

The Bichard Inquiry is concerned with the movement of soft information and will not be looking too hard at the receiving end of that movement. Maybe it is a good time, nonetheless, for those who have happily been interpreting soft information - and criminal records - since 1986 to come out into the open and start a public debate on just how they do it. 

Terry Thomas, reader in social work, Leeds Metropolitan University.

References

¹ Home Office, Disclosure of Criminal records for Employment Vetting Purposes, Cm 2319, HMSO para17, 1993

² J Smith, "Prior criminality and employment of social workers with substantial access to children: a decision board analysis," British Journal of Social Work 29: 69-95, 1999