Be careful what you ask for
As of 10th March there is a new offence that will bite some employers!
Under the Data Protection Act it’s now a crime to ask someone to exercise their subject access rights to reveal data held about them by someone else and to reveal that data to a person. In other words, you could be prosecuted if you ask an employee, a job candidate or a contractor, for example, to request and disclose information about their convictions and cautions.
This doesn’t mean that employers will always be denied access to these sorts of details. But you should use the checks available through the Disclosure and Barring Service rather than forcing someone to make a data subject access request. The latter is seen as an unfair way of an employer getting more information than they’re entitled to. That’s because subject access requests don’t distinguish between spent and unspent convictions and so result in disclosure of all personal information (with a few exceptions).
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