About a month ago, I wrote to my MP, James Purnell, about the National Staff Dismissal Register.  Today, much to my astonishment, I received the reply he’d got from the Home Office.  Here it is in full, minus the opening and closing pleasantries:

The Action Against Business Crime (AABC) group was set up with Home Office funding. I should make it lear this funding was set up to maintain 120 business crime partnerships across England and Wales. All Home Office funding ceased in March last year, and the AABC is now a self-financing commercial organisation.

The National Staff Dismissal Register is a commercial initiative of the AABC and the Home Office has not been consulted about its setting up, and will not be involved in any way in its operation. It will be for AABC to ensure that the register complies with all relevant legislation.

[Dave] is concerned about data protection issues. The Police Act 1997, which established the Disclosure service, allows the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) access to central records, such as the informatio held on the Police National Computer (PNC). The National Staff Dismissal Register would not form part of those central records. However the criminal convictions which appear on the register would be reproduced on a Disclosure, but from the official record held on the PNC, and only where a person is being recruited into a post eligible for a Disclosure. Retail posts are not usually eligible.

The CRB was established in 2002 to widen access to criminal record histories for those organsations entitled, by legislation, to ask for such information. This authority was based on the nature of the specific post. The Exceptions Order to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 defines the types of posts that are covered by the Disclosure service which are largely, but not exclusively, those working with children or vulnerable adults. The CRB provides this information by accessing the PNC and lists held by other Government authorities; it does not maintain its own databases.

The CRB Disclosure process requires the authority of the applicant as well as the ‘employer’; both parties see the resultant certificate which will include details of convictions, cautions, reprimands and warnings, any information about whether the person has been barred from working within the relevant sector and other non-conviction information release, after due consideration of relevance, at the discretion of a senior police officer. All information contained can be questioned by the applicant if he/she feels it is inaccurate which may result in correction.

And there you have it.  The government paid for a shiny new “business crime partnership” then, a few years later, spun it off as a “self-financing commercial organisation” and washed their hands of it and sent it on its merry way.  No need for the government to take any responsibility, now, for the actions of the monster they created (or at least, whose creation they funded).  Such is the gist of the first two paragraphs; the rest is a very mildly interesting look at how the CRB system works, but since the whole point of the NSDR is that it is free to work independently of this framework, that tells us nothing.