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Appeal No. UA-2023-001947-V
Rule 14 Order: It is prohibited for any person to disclose or publish any matter likely to lead members of the public to identify the appellant in these proceedings or any school at which he worked.
Any breach of this order is liable to be treated as a contempt of court and may be punishable by imprisonment, fine or other sanctions under section 25 of the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007. The maximum punishment that may be imposed is a sentence of two years’ imprisonment or an unlimited fine.
Between:
PC
Appellant
- v -
DISCLOSURE AND BARRING SERVICE
Respondent
Before: Upper Tribunal Judge Stout
Tribunal Member Graham
Tribunal Member Heggie
Hearing date(s): 10 March 2025
Mode of hearing: In person (Manchester)
Representation:
Appellant: In person, accompanied by his sister
Respondent: Ashley Serr (counsel)
On appeal from a decision of the Disclosure and Barring Service:
DBS Reference Number: 00977503603
Date of decision letter: 21 March 2023
SUMMARY OF DECISION
SAFEGUARDING VULNERABLE GROUPS (65)
The appellant was included by the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) on the children’s barred list pursuant to paragraph 3 of Schedule 3 to the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 (SVGA 2006) because he had “attempted to pay for, downloaded and viewed indecent images of children”. Since the decision, the appellant had been convicted of an offence of possession of indecent images of children so that his case would if it had been considered by DBS at that stage have fallen under the ‘auto-barring with representations’ provisions in paragraph 2 of Schedule 3. The Upper Tribunal decided that the conviction made no difference to the basis of the appeal which remained against DBS’s original decision. The Upper Tribunal decided that there were minor errors of fact in DBS’s decision largely as a result of failure properly to take into account the implications of the appellant’s diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. However, the errors were not material. The Upper Tribunal decided there were no mistakes of fact or law in the decision and the appeal was dismissed.
Please note the Summary of Decision is included for the convenience of readers. It does not form part of the decision. The Decision and Reasons of the Tribunal follow.
DECISION
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- The decision of the Upper Tribunal is that there are no mistakes of fact or law in the decision of the Disclosure and Barring Service. The decision of the Disclosure and Barring Service confirmed. The
- Introduction
- This hearing / reasonable adjustments
- DBS’s decision
- The grant of permission to appeal
- Developments since DBS’s decision in this case
- The relevant legal principles
- The Upper Tribunal’s jurisdiction on appeal
- The significance of the appellant’s conviction to DBS’s decision and this appeal
- The evidence and our findings of fact
- The grounds of appeal
- DBS’s finding that the appellant attempted to pay for indecent images of children, rather than that he attempted to pay for images of persons aged 18 and over
- DBS’s finding that the appellant viewed the indecent image (video) of a child a second time rather than just that he accessed the dark web a second time
- DBS’s finding that the appellant must have realised the female in the video was a child at the time that he masturbated, and not just subsequently as he said
- DBS’s finding that the appellant went to great lengths to access the dark web, when in fact it was straightforward (and not illegal) to do so
- DBS’s failure to address the substance of the references that the appellant had provided, and to take those into account when considering what risk he poses to children
- DBS’s failure to take into account the appellant’s ASD diagnosis, and his difficulty identifying body language and facial emotion when considering the relevance of his statement that ‘it was weird bec
- Proportionality
- Roger Graham
- We bear in mind that we should not order a restriction on publication simply because both parties seek it: see X v Z Ltd [1998] ICR 43, CA. However, in this case, we are satisfied that the private int
- Open justice means that justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. In Cape Intermediate Holdings Limited v Dring [2019] UKSC 38 , [2020] AC 629 the Supreme Court explained the purpose
- Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) provides that: “Judgment shall be pronounced publicly but the press and public may be excluded from all or part of the trial in the inter
- Numerous cases have emphasised the link between open justice and the right under Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights to freedom of expression and have provided guidance on the nature
- An order anonymising someone who would otherwise be named in court proceedings is an interference with the principle of open justice. As Lord Reed JSC described in A v BBC [2015] AC 588 at [23]: “It i
- Ordinarily, it is said that it is not unreasonable to regard a person who brings proceedings as having accepted the normal incidences of their public nature, including the potential embarrassment and
- In this particular jurisdiction, the considerations are somewhat different to those in the authorities we have mentioned, because this is an appeal in relation to the appellant’s inclusion on the barr
- Conclusions