FOI release

SIA licence applicants with criminal convictions

Published 27 June 2024

Request

Could you please supply me with the following information concerning the Security Industry Authority and the process of obtaining a licence with previous or current criminal convictions from 2019 to 2024?

1. How many SIA licence holders have declared criminal convictions or are awaiting a sentence disposal?

2. It states in your information that applicants with a criminal record are judged on a ‘case by case’ basis. What are the main things you consider when judging applicants in this way?

3. How many people have the final say when deciding if a person being judged on a ‘case by case’ basis is approved for a licence?

4. How many licence holders have had their licences revoked in the past five years? Can you break this information down according to the years?

5. How many reports of misconduct have been reported to the SIA in the past five years that involve assault or sexual assault allegations?

Response

I can confirm that the SIA does hold some of this information. In respect of question 1, this email will constitute a refusal to deal with your request as the time frame will need to be significantly restricted to bring it within the appropriate cost limit.

I can confirm that we can provide full answers to questions 2-5.

Question 1

Exceeding the Appropriate Cost Limit

Section 12(1)-(4) of the Freedom of Information Act allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to comply with the request in its entirety or to confirm or deny whether the requested information is held. In the case of a public authority such as the SIA, the appropriate cost limit is £450.

The ICO guidance, the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, sets out how a public authority should estimate whether the work required to obtain information is reasonable and appropriate. In the case of requests that would require work on the part of public authority staff, this is estimated at a rate of £25 per person per hour. This means that 18 hours is considered the appropriate limit.

There are a variety of ways in which licence holders may declare criminality to us during their licence term, which is typically 3 years. However, reporting limitations within the database where this information is held means that it cannot be instantly isolated and retrieved. The SIA would have to manually interrogate thousands of licence applications over the period you have requested to collate this information which would greatly exceed the cost and time limitations.

What information can we provide?

We can provide you with some information. Between 2019 and 2024, 39,193 individuals applying for a SIA licence declared criminality on their application. As mentioned above, this does not include licence holders who declared criminality to us during the lifetime of their licence.

Next steps

To facilitate a response, I suggest that you limit the scope of your request so that we can manually search licence applications until the appropriate cost limit is reached. Given that it will be a very time-intensive exercise to manually look at each case and filter out those people who declared criminality to us during their licence term, I would ask that you limit your search to a particular month within the period in which you are interested.

Question 2

The SIA considers the actual sentence or disposal, the offence or offences of which an individual has been convicted, and time since the sentence restrictions ended. For further information on our criminal record checks, please go to pages 28-42 of Get Licensed, our licensing criteria, available online.

The SIA also considers non-conviction information, which is any other information that indicates whether a person is fit and proper to hold a licence. You can read more about what constitutes non-conviction information and where we obtain it from on page 39 of Get Licensed.

Question 3

Where a manual licensing decision is necessary, the final decision on a licence application will usually be made by 1 person. This includes recommendations escalated to senior management for approval. Some complex applications may need to be reviewed by multiple people, for example as part of a review group that looks at applications involving certain types of offences.

[Editor’s note: Our licensing system can automatically grant a licence if the applicant has no criminality on record and they meet our other licensing criteria. By design, the decision to refuse or grant a licence to an applicant with offences on their record cannot be made automatically by the system; it must be made by a human.]

Question 4

Please be aware that a large proportion of revocations in 2023 and 2024 relate to the licence holder’s right to work in the UK expiring and that the number of licence holders has increased year on year.

Year	Number of licences revoked
2019	958
2020	957
2021	1,079
2022	1,272
2023	3,882
2024 to date	2,693

Question 5

Please be aware that the SIA does not run a complaints service for complaints about security operatives or companies. Instead, we treat such information as intelligence. We evaluate all intelligence we receive to assess whether there is any intervention within our powers that we should take. We do not contact people who provide intelligence to tell them how we used the information they gave us. This is for data protection reasons and because telling people how we use such information could affect our ability to take effective action in the future.

Year	Number of intelligence reports involving assault/sexual assault allegations
2019	332
2020	283
2021	331
2023	500
2024 to date	280

[Ref: FOI 0511]