retail environment
The PM is thinking outside the box
The UK Prime Minister David Cameron has announced that criminals will no longer have to ‘tick the box’ that reveals past convictions on job applications.
The new law will mean that only when the applicants get to interview stage will they have to reveal previous offences.
The announcement is aimed at preventing employers from dismissing applicants at the first hurdle, a rule that has been seen as discriminatory by many campaign groups.
“I want to build a country where the shame of prior convictions does not necessarily hold people back from working and providing for their families,” the PM said.
A campaign had already been urging the LP community to ‘think outside the box’ and work more closely with their HR colleagues to get rid of a UK practice that discriminates against a broad section of the ‘seeking new opportunities’ population and is potentially harming the employer’s ability to recruit high-quality and loyal staff.
These are candidates with previous convictions that have been spent as defined by the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, but become ensnared by what seems to be a fairly innocuous ‘box’ on the job application form.
According to charity Unlock which works to change people’s perceptions of people with previous convictions, the UK had been lagging behind its European partners in ‘banning the box’ – the pre-screening ‘tick-box’ on application forms which asks candidates about their previous convictions.
This is not, the charity argues, a back door to non-disclosure of criminal records, but a way of fast-tracking potential candidates through the first stage of recruitment to the interview stage where their past behaviour can be more thoroughly interrogated. This would mean that they would not automatically fall at the first hurdle and be disqualified from the process simply because they felt obliged to tick a box that asked the blanket, catch-all question: ‘do you have a criminal record?’ – irrespective of whether it was live or spent.
Christopher Stacey, Director of Unlock put forward the proposal as part of a series of recommendations that resulted out of research carried out with the support of a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship.
As part of the research, Stacey had visited France, Spain and Sweden, where he looked at how the countries deal with criminal records, particularly in disclosing them for employment purposes. In Rehabilitation & Desistance vs Disclosure, he reports on two main areas for each country – who has access to criminal records and how they’re used, and what systems the country has in place to protect or expunge records to minimise the collateral consequences of a criminal record.
“In these countries, there was much greater faith and confidence that people rehabilitate, and so there’s little need for them to have to disclose their record. This results in more progressive ‘expungement’ policies which allow people with convictions to be protected from the potential prejudice and stigma that they might otherwise face. The majority of employers in these countries didn’t use criminal record checks, recognising the shortfalls of them as a recruitment tool,” he said.
Retailers are at the vanguard of the thorny employment issues because of the high churn rate in some organisations and playing both sides of brand protection scenarios – the risk of employing active fraudsters versus the dangers of seemingly discriminating against recruits with spent convictions. According to Unlock, retail LP and HR departments now have an opportunity to review their processes and promote both fairness and firmness in their recruitment strategies.
