Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, whether his Department operates a ban the box employment policy in respect of ex-offender job applicants with unspent convictions; and how many employees of his Department have unspent convictions.

The Department is committed to ensuring that all of our recruitment is done in a fair and open manner, and that all applicants are treated equally.

Consequently, we do operate a ban-the-box policy within our recruitments, and applicants are not asked to provide any information on previous unspent convictions at any point in the selection process.

While successful applicants are subject to criminal record and security clearance checks during pre-appointment, declaration forms are not retained centrally once monitoring checks have been carried out.