Police proposing to disclose non-conviction information to prospective employer - disclosure under statutory scheme subject to rules of natural justice and common law requirements of procedural fairness - right to make representations before decision made

R (X) v Chief Constable of the West Midlands Police: QBD (Mr Justice Wall): 23 January 2004

The claimant, a social worker with no criminal convictions, sought judicial review by way of declarations and an order to quash the defendant's decision to provide to a prospective employer information contained in the 'other relevant information' section of an enhanced criminal record certificate, issued pursuant to section 115 of the Police Act 1997, concerning allegations of two acts of indecent exposure with which the claimant had been charged, but where the case had been discontinued when the alleged victim failed to identify the claimant.

Dan Squires (instructed by Public Law Solicitors, Birmingham) for the claimant; Fiona Barton (instructed by solicitor, West Midlands Police Authority, Birmingham) for the defendant.

Held, granting judicial review, that the fact that section 115 was clearly designed to meet the pressing social need to protect children and vulnerable adults from abuse by those employed to care for them did not mean that disclosure of additional, non-conviction information under section 115 was automatic or that it was not surrounded by the stringent conditions of natural justice and procedural fairness; that principles relating to disclosure needed to be applied all the more stringently where the information dealt with a person who had not been either convicted of a criminal offence or found on the balance of probabilities to have committed an act of indecency by a judge in civil proceedings, and where the identity of the person who was alleged to have committed the act was in issue; and that the failure to afford the claimant the opportunity to make representations on the material it was proposed to disclose made the decision to provide the information procedurally unfair so that it could not stand.

(WLR)