14 Sep 2012

Minor crime leads to fourth PCC election drop-out

What a farce! Yet another of this November’s candidates for the Police and Crime Commissioner elections has stood down over a minor offence committed while he was a teenager.

Phil Dilks, a Labour Party official who was standing to become police commissioner in Lincolnshire, resigned today after admitting that he had been fined £5 for an offence committed 44 years ago when he was 16 years old.

Dilks said today: “Despite the Home Secretary claiming minor offences committed as teenagers would not bar anyone from standing in these elections to choose Police and Crime Commissioners, I have taken independent advice about an incident in the 1960s that resulted in a £5 fine.

“I have now received legal guidance, and following further clarifications from the Home Office and the Electoral Commission, it has become clear that because of what happened more than four decades ago, I must now step down as a prospective candidate in these elections.

“Some 44 years ago, I was one of a group of lads on scooters visiting a mate in hospital. I believe it was in the school summer holidays in 1968 when I was 16. As we left the car park to go home, one of the lads stupidly picked up an old crash helmet that wasn’t his. We all went back to my family home to mess about as teenagers do. Unknown to me, the helmet was left in our garage. The police never found out who took it, but because it was found in our garage, I was charged with handling stolen goods.”

Phil Dilks is the fourth (and arguably fifth) major candidate to withdraw from these elections in the past few weeks over offences committed many years ago when they they teenagers.

First, on 2 July, Simon Weston stepped down as an independent contender in South Wales on the grounds that the race was becoming “too political”. In reality, Weston would have been disqualified anyway because he was convicted 36 years ago, when he was about 14, of being found in a stolen car with a gang of older boys. He was fined £30 and put on probation.

Yet only days before both the Home Secretary, Theresa May, and the Attorney General Dominic Grieve expressed the view that the 2011 Police and Social Responsibility Act would not disqualify Weston (and I suspect that May advised Weston to this effect personally). Yet Home Office officials rightly thought otherwise.

Second, on 8 August, the Labour candidate in Avon and Somerset, Bob Ashford, withdrew because of two offences committed 46 years ago when he was aged 13 – trespass on the railway and possession of an offensive weapon (an airgun he says was supplied by other boys). He was fined £2.50 for each offence.

Third, on 31 August, Mike Quigley, Conservative candidate for Nottinghamshire, resigned because an offence for which he was convicted 44 years ago. Details have not been disclosed.

Earlier, in June, Kieron Mallon, an Oxfordshire councillor who was hoping to become the Conservative candidate for Thames Valley, withdrew from the selection process because an assault conviction in 2001 for which he was fined £500.

Also in August the Labour candidate in Derbyshire, Alan Charles, withdrew from the race, and then rejoined it, because of uncertainty over a minor offence which he committed as a teenager. But because he had accepted a police caution, rather than be formally convicted, it was thought that the strict qualification rules in the 2011 act did not apply to him.

With the exception of Mallon’s conviction, most people would probably argue that it’s absurd for people to be excluding from contesting these elections of the grounds of minor offences convicted many decades ago when they were so young.

Perhaps the qualification rules should be tougher for PCCs than they are for MPs and councillors, but everyone I have spoken to about this matter thinks they are simply too tough.

What’s striking about all this is the sheer incompetence of the Conservative and Labour parties in handling this. Senior ministers such as May and Grieve seem to have been ignorant of the new law, or what it meant, even though the then police minister Nick Herbert made it clear when the bill was in committee that the strict rules excluded people convicted of offences for which they might have gone to jail, also applied to juvenile offences.

Labour knew this too. They had MPs in the committee. Indeed, Labour’s police spokesman David Hanson had an especial personal interest in that his wife Margaret was interested in becoming a candidate. But both Herbert and Hanson seem to have failed to advise their parties to carry out extra stringent checks, or if they did they were ignored.

Indeed, when Ed Miliband visited Corby a few weeks ago I even advised the Labour Party general secretary Iain McNicol to carry out a proper check on all his candidates (and I’ve given similar advice to officials of other parties). And I’m pretty sure I also mentioned the problem to Phil Dilks who was at the event in Corby as well.

The question now, of course, is who quits next?

And will any further offences, or juvenile convictions, be confessed or discovered in the run-up to the elections. After mid-October the damage will be far greater, as it will be too late for parties to find replacement candidates.

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