THE NEW LEGISLATION

As a consequence of the Bichard Inquiry into the Soham murders, all Public Bodies, organisations and companies who employ staff working with children or vulnerable adults within the UK are required to conduct Criminal Record Checks on all employees engaged in regulated activities.

The new legislation will affect 11.3m workers in the UK of which it is estimated that up to 1.3m are migrant workers.

Currently the following organisations can do these checks for employers and employees who are UK nationals but no protocols are in place for historical checking of overseas workers in their country of origin:

• England and Wales - Criminal Records Bureau (CRB)

• Scotland - Disclosure Scotland

• Northern Ireland - Access NI

Therefore Public Bodies, organisations and companies who work in any capacity with children and vulnerable adults will either have to outsource checking to specialist companies such as Global Vetting or employ HR staff to carry out a comprehensive and expensive vetting process themselves in each of the countries from which they have employees

The issue for employers is complicated by the fact that each country operates it's own system. In some countries information available may be inadequate for recruitment purposes, in which case consideration should be given to background reference checks.

Without guidance, disparities between overseas criminal record checks and CRB checks could create employment issues for HR professionals.

At Global Vetting we can provide independently verified Criminal Record checks for non UK nationals from their own countries, effectively managing the risk for employers by meeting and surpassing the legislative requirement.

Working in partnership we can help you to safeguard our children and vulnerable adults by providing you with valuable information on overseas workers and candidates.