Kelly v Leonardo Employment Tribunal Thread 4

Great summary!

You can always get a DBS check no matter how many convictions you have. The question is what will appear on it.

Murder and rape convictions will always appear on a DBS check unless something has gone wrong and they have failed to identify the correct individual. They are never removed. However, an employer cannot refuse to employ someone simply because they have offences on their DBS check. The employer can only refuse employment if the offences are relevant to the role. It is therefore possible that the employer decided that convictions for murder and rape were not relevant to a role as a security guard. I think that would be a mistake by the employer, but it is possible that is what happened.

Don't forget DBS checks rely on people being honest.
'Trans' applicants have a special application route, and name/'gender' changes are supposed to be disclosed by everyone.
So in some cases we are relying on criminals to be honest.

Edited to add; as far as I know the loopholes pointed out by KPSS have nevr been closed:

https://kpssinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/DBS-Checks-and-Identity-Verification.pdf

I don't know.

Either he passed the dbs check because for whatever reason his previous 3 convictions were not on there, or the crown court employed him despite knowing he was was a three times convicted rapist and murderer.

Even if they hadn't been on his dbs and they'd employed him thinking he was an honest upstanding thoroughly decent member of society that doesn't change the fact he still had those convictions. He was still a very bad man who was a danger to women and children.

They employed him after he'd raped me, and before it was reported so that conviction wouldn't have been there yet.

Whichever way you look at it how the judge in the Employment Tribunal can say if a man has been checked out by his employer that means he's of no threat to women is just ludicrous.

My opinion on the judgement:

Judge to women: Toilets are a trivial matter. There is plenty of choice. They are there to do your business and it shouldn’t matter who uses which.

Judge to TW: It’s really important that you have access to the women’s toilets that match your self identified GI.

Yes, the Huntley case led to the Bichard inquiry which in turn led to the founding of the Independent Safeguarding Authority, which was subsequently merged with the CRB to form the DBS. The inquiry also led to various procedures being tightened.

In safeguarding training, we always tell trainees that DBS checks on their own are not enough. They will only tell you about convictions or, rarely, cases where the police have relevant non-conviction information.

The judge uses the small number of trans staff and the vetting requirements to argue that allowing trans-identifying men into the women's toilets was not likely to place women at a greater risk of violence of sexual assault in the toilets than men. However, from a safeguarding perspective, I would say that vetting may help to reduce the risk, but it does not eliminate it. We know that, on average, child sex offenders commit around 100 offences before they are caught. I don't know of any equivalent figure for violence or sexual assault but, given that the vast majority of sexual abuse incidents are never reported to the police, it is also likely to be high. It may be that none of the trans-identifying employees at Leonardo are a threat to women, but it is clearly wrong to say that the small number of such employees and the fact they are vetted means there is no risk or that it reduces the risk to the same level as that faced by men.

How horrendous. I don't know much about DBS checks, but you're saying that murderers and rapists can pass? Do these convictions get spent? Surely violent crimes should prevent getting a DBS for the rest of your life.

I had to act as a character witness for a school friend who went through enhanced vetting in the early 2000's. I was invited to a members club by a retired officer, we had a nice lunch then he got onto the questions

• Did x go to parties a lot?
• Did he like to drink?
• Did he drink excessively?
• Did I think that he could keep a secret?
• Did he have money troubles
• Had I ever lent him money
• Was he a homosexual?
• Did I consider him to be a womanizer?

Yes. I have had different ones for various volunteer jobs as well as teaching. The system has changed a few times - I believe the horrible case with Ian Huntley changed the system too.

I got the last laugh, he died in prison!

The teacher thing doesn't surprise me, it's probably near the top of the list of dream jobs for certain people with bad intentions.

I get that your average person might think dbs checks and extended vetting are more thorough than they actually are. I also get that your average person would assume those people that had issues flag up on their checks would not get employed.

But the judge should bloody know better.

The DBS can only find out if you’ve already been caught. It can’t look in your head (or indeed your hard drive) to see if you should have been caught.

What you say about teachers makes me feel quite sick.

The vetted comment was so stupid. It made it even more clear that the Judge was clutching for any (im)possible reason to dismiss all of Kelly's claims.

If these were all such trustworthy males, then surely they would dutifully obey a Leonardo's policy on toilets that protected single-sex spaces. So as trans-identifying men they would know to use either use the men's toilet or an individual single-room gender-neutral toilet. And they could be trusted to obediently keep out of the women's.

The decision for the appeal is whether go for maximum humiliation on the grounds of it being a perverse decision by the Judge. Or simply on the grounds of her misapplication of law, her failure to address key points, and/or her lack of evidence regarding 'facts' stated in the judgement.

This was the most illogical and biased judgement I have ever read. If I were part of the Morton Fraser MacRoberts law firm I would be furious at having our reputation damaged by association.

How horrendous @Boiledbeetle . For every woman campaigning, I don’t think the judge gets that we have years of experience for our reasonings.

Yes DBS system can only do so much too. In my last longer post, lighthearted songs aside, I didn’t say that there are so many teachers in my data.

On the vetting subject...

The man who raped me had previous convictions. When he was sentenced it turned out he had two previous convictions for raping children. He also had been in prison for murdering a woman in her 80s.

When he was arrested he was working in a job that meant he would have had a dbs check at the least, as he was a security guard at the crown court.

Any woman or child in the crown court building would be perfectly safe if he had decided he was a woman and had chosen to use the women's toilets by EJ MS's thinking.

@TwoLoonsAndASprout I was writing all the professions down with teachers instead of lawyers and got into my head! There’s some good lines in that song.

Edit: apologies for earworm. If it’s any consolation, it’s in mine too.

Oh I got it straight away, and now have the delightful Annie and Aretha as today’s earworm!

They are indeed.

The sisters are doing it for themselves?

I agree.

Also that last paragraph of mine perhaps should have been put into song lines to make clear it’s not my usual vernacular!

Vetting in for defense companies mostly checks to see if you are of generally good character and if there is anything in your past the puts you at risk of being compromised by a foreign agent. It is not like a DBS check where you are specifically being checked for working with children
Having a criminal record is not necessarily a reason why you would fail the vetting process. The bar is not that high
I think that the judge is reading a bit too much into the term 'vetted'

I was just thinking about vetting - the type of man who put hidden cameras in loos tends to be ones that has been vetted. Maybe they are just the ones more likely to get caught and the story put in the papers. The politician in Edinburgh got his cameras right into the heart of parliament.

Voyeurism doesn’t seem to matter to the judge.

I now have a song in my head:
We got doctors, Lawyers, politicians too

Now there was a time, when they used to say, that behinds of every grown man were allowed in loos for grown women. But in these times of change, you know that it's no longer true. So we're coming into the courtroom cause there's something we forgot to say to you.

It was an incredibly stupid or maybe just naive comment from the judge. People who have been vetted can still cause harm , a vetted male in a female single space can still be an affront the the privacy and dignity of a woman. Plenty of men in the military are vetted and still sexually abuse and harass their female colleagues or has she never heard of the scandals at various military basis with males using their rank as a power play in their sexual abuse and harassment of women.

Our teams expect to see people who have varied life experiences and will take a realistic view of modern life.

Acting with the highest standards of confidentiality and discretion, they make no moral judgements, handling personal information with respect and impartiality.

Their role is to support the security requirements, guaranteeing dignity and professionalism at all times.

Good to know you can get dignity in vetting - just not in the toilets!

AI tells me it’s United Kingdom Security Vetting (UKSV),

• *Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS)*: Basic check for all roles—verifies identity, employment history (last 3 years), and unspent criminal convictions. Completed quickly during recruitment.

• *Security Check (SC)*: Standard for most Leonardo positions involving "official-sensitive" information. Includes BPSS plus checks on the last 10 years of residency, criminal records, financial history, and a departmental interview.

Mmmm so it checks you’re not a convicted criminal - but say3% of rapes end in a conviction - 97% of rapists are male and freely roaming in society.

1. *Decision and Notification*:

So if something dodgy turns up maybe Leonardo doesn’t actually know - they just get told a yay or nay from a third party?

Teenagers famously would never think to engage in antisocial behaviour in the dark!