Minor offences may stay secret after legal challenge fails

The Royal Courts of Justicesource: The Guardian Law
published: 30 January 2019

People given police cautions or reprimands as children or those convicted of multiple minor offences may not have to disclose them in future after the government lost a legal challenge to the criminal record checks system.

In a complex ruling on four separate cases, the supreme court rejected three of the appeals by the Home Office over the issue of whether those who were found guilty of lesser offences or cautions need to disclose them when seeking employment involving contact with children and vulnerable adults.

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The cuts that broke the justice system

Blind justice lawsource: Politics.co.uk
published: 26 November 2018

Leaking roofs, seats held together with gaffer tape, flooded toilets, broken heating and broken plug sockets. If our hospitals or schools looked like this, there’d be a public outcry. But these are our courts, so no-one really cares.

The cuts to criminal justice have become visible in the furniture of the court system, but they go much further than that. They are eroding the basic principles it operates under.

Next year, legal aid reaches its 70th birthday. It is a landmark principle that justice should be free to everyone, that publicly-funded legal advice should be available to those accused of a crime by the state.

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Grenfell firefighter: MPs should be dragged to look at tower’s shell

Fire Burning Building in Wallsource: The Guardian
published: 21 October 2017

MPs should be “dragged” from parliament to see Grenfell Tower’s shell as a reminder of how their decisions caused the disaster, a firefighter has said.

Lucy Masoud, who worked on the recovery operation after the fire that killed around 80 people, blamed the tragedy on government austerity measures and a contempt for social housing tenants.

Speaking at the Stand Up To Racism national conference, the Chelsea-based firefighter said her colleagues would never get over their experiences on the night of 14 June.

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