Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make an assessment of the adequacy of the length of time covered by overseas criminal record certificates.

We take the issue of preventing foreign criminals entering the UK extremely seriously.

Overseas criminal record certificates are one of a number of checks undertaken to establish whether a person has committed any offences overseas.

Visa applicants coming here to work in education, health and social care sectors must provide a criminal record certificate from any country they have lived for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. This continues to be considered a fair balance between capturing any significant and recent criminal history, and what is available from some territories’ criminal record data systems.

The requirement strengthens the existing process of checks enabling us to establish whether the person has committed any offences overseas, including standard self-declaration of any criminal history as part of an application to come to the UK.