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round three quarters of employers have admitted that they
discriminate against applicants who have a criminal record. This,
says the business-led charity Business in the Community (BITC), is
their loss, as it means that they’re missing out on a vast pool of
skills and talent.
One of the main means of exclusion is the tick box on job application forms
that asks about previous convictions – a ‘blunt instrument’, according to BITC.
It’s this that led the organisation to launch the Ban the Box campaign last year,
calling for people to be judged on their ability to do the job and with the
disclosure of convictions delayed until a later stage of the recruitment process.
The initial inspiration came from a US campaign with the same name,
launched by an organisation called the National Employment Law Project. ‘It had
the same principles as ours but it was taking a legislative approach based on
equal opportunities, and saying that people from certain minority ethnic groups
were being disproportionately affected because they were over-represented in the
prison population,’ says BITC’s work inclusion campaign manager Nicola Inge.
BITC followed the US campaign’s progress and a couple of years ago began
working with a group of companies led by Alliance Boots to look at the issues
around increasing employment opportunities for ex-offenders in the UK. ‘One of
the things they all agreed that they could do – and that was within their control
and would make a positive impact – was to remove the tick box from their
application forms and move it further down the process,’ she says.
BITC began a dialogue with other organisations involved in supporting
offenders back into work, such as Nacro, Unlock, the St Giles Trust and Recruit
with Conviction, to find out whether it was something they would support and
then took the idea to the business community itself, holding discussions during
Responsible Business Week. After a good response from both, the campaign was
worked up for its launch last October.
‘A really big part of it for us is sensitising people to the campaign, and getting
employers to change their practices,’ she says, and so far the response has been
positive, with 15 employers – who collectively employ 150,000 people – signed
up. ‘We’re very pleased with the reception, and we’ve learned a lot.’
One of the main lessons has been how much depends on the sector, she
stresses. ‘Either the sector they’re in or they’re working with being regulated or
having particularly strict security measures, and that actually there’s a lot of lack
of understanding among the business community about what they can and can’t
ask. That’s the stuff that we’ve really been developing as the campaign’s being
going on – resources to help them understand the regulatory environment and
take some of the fear out of it.’
Much of this fear is ‘based on it being a very complex issue’, she
acknowledges, often exacerbated by misrepresentations in the media. ‘But what I
find is that once you actually take people into a prison and introduce them to
people who’ve got convictions – once they can tangibly grab hold of it and get
their head around it – that fear goes and they realise that it’s actually not as
difficult as they thought.’
However, it’s not necessarily just fear on the part of the employers, she
explains. ‘They have concerns about safeguarding their employees, their
customers, their clients, so it’s almost a fear on behalf of what they think their
employees, customers or clients would think. It has so many layers that we need
to tackle, which is why we’ve been really grateful for the support we’ve received
from organisations who’ve endorsed the campaign, because alone we can’t
change the perceptions of every employer in the country – much as we’d like to.
We’ve really relied heavily on the businesses that have signed up and the
organisations that have endorsed us.’
One of these is Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, the first law firm to sign up
and an organisation that’s had a long-standing involvement with BITC’s Ready for
Work programme, which helps people overcome disadvantage and move into
employment. ‘About a third of the people we support through Ready for Work
have unspent convictions and Freshfields, to their huge credit, have been very
forward-thinking and brave in focusing their involvement on offering placements
and employment to some of our Ready for Work clients.’
So far they’ve offered around 250 paid placements, with 25 people even going
on to full-time employment at the firm. ‘The reason they were so quick to adopt
Ban the Box is that they’d already been working with and employing ex-offenders,’
8 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| June 2014
Cover story |
Employment
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
Having a drug-related conviction
can spell exclusion from many
professions. On the eve of the
second Recovery Festival, Nicola
Inge of Business in the Community
talks to
David Gilliver
about
breaking down barriers to work for
people with criminal convictions
BEYOND
CONVICTION