No 318 Rehabilitation of Offenders (Exceptions) (Amendment) Order (Northern Ireland) 2012
The Order comes into operation on 10 September 2012 with Article 2 of the 1979 Order providing exceptions to article 5(2) of the Rehabilitation of Offenders (Northern Ireland) Order 1978 (“the 1978 Order”) (questions which relate to spent convictions).
Article 3 of this Order updates the 1979 Order to enable the finance industry and the Financial Services Authority to consider all spent convictions committed by individuals falling within the Order by deleting references to “relevant offences”. Articles 4, 5 and 6 of this Order make similar amendments.
Articles 1, 2 and 3 of this Order also update the 1979 Order to permit the Financial Services Authority to take spent convictions into account when exercising certain functions under the Payment Services Regulations 2009 and the Electronic Money Regulations 2011 relating to payment institutions and electronic money institutions.
Article 7 updates the 1979 Order to secure that the coverage of the 1979 Order is unaffected by the amendments made to the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups (Northern Ireland) Order 2007 by the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. Without the changes made by this article, those amendments would operate to limit the range of cases in which the 1979 Order would permit questions to be asked, or allow persons to be excluded from certain types of work and would therefore reduce the protection afforded by the 1979 Order to children and vulnerable adults. The changes made by Article 7 secure that there is no reduction in that protection.
Article 7 also updates the 1979 Order to simplify the way in which it covers health and social care occupations; to provide coverage of the 1979 Order to those providing advocacy services for vulnerable adults; and to remove inoperative (or largely inoperative) material from the 1979 Order.