ITN
Hundreds 'labelled criminals'
Hundreds 'labelled criminals'
Nearly 1,500 innocent people have been wrongly labelled as criminals because of errors by the Home Office's Criminal Records Bureau. A newspaper reported that the mistakes had seen ordinary people - from court ushers to students - wrongly identified as pornographers, thieves and violent robbers. In some cases, the paper said, people had been turned down for jobs or university places while others had had to be fingerprinted at their local police station to prove that they were not criminals. But the Home Office offered no apology for the errors, simply saying that they were 'regrettable'. It said that the mistakes were a result of 'mismatches' which arose when the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) was carrying out checks on people applying for jobs working in positions of trust with children or vulnerable adults. 'Last year CRB checks prevented 25,000 unsuitable people from gaining such positions, and customer satisfaction is now at an all-time high,' a Home Office spokesman said. 'We make no apology for erring on the side of caution. We are talking about the protection of children and vulnerable adults. 'This is not about the CRB making `mistakes': where there has been a mismatch, it is because the individual's details are similar or even identical to someone else's conviction data on the Police National Computer. 'These cases are clearly regrettable, but represent a tiny proportion of cases - 0.03% of the 9 million disclosures issued by the CRB since it began operating in March 2002.'
ITN | May 21, 2006
