You will not get a licence unless your sentence restrictions for a conviction, caution or warning have ended for at least two years before your licence application, or for at least five years before you licence application where we consider the offence to be serious. Serious offences include those involving violence, weapons, drugs, serious criminal damage, theft and dishonesty.

We will pay special attention to offences involving violence, weapons, drugs, criminal damage and sexual offences.

We also consider the effects of rehabilitation on assessing your eligibility for a licence, and in some circumstances, will treat cautions and warnings on record more leniently than convictions.

Where we judge it necessary to refuse your licence we will write to you to inform you of our decision.

Charges awaiting trial

If, when we process your application, there are outstanding charges against you for relevant offences, we will wait until the courts have determined the outcome of the charges before making a decision.

Ex-juvenile offenders

If offences which you committed as a juvenile remain on record then we will take them into account as we do any other offence. We will see how relevant, how serious and how recent they were, but we will also consider your age at the time of the offence.

We will not consider criminal records gained between the ages of ten and twelve unless they relate to extremely serious offences as described in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. We will, however, look at any serious offences committed between the ages of twelve and fifteen and all relevant offences if committed when you were sixteen or seventeen.



By "end of sentence restrictions" we mean the date of sentencing plus the length of the penalty for convictions, not from the date when you were sentenced or when the offence was committed. For cautions and warnings, the end of sentence restrictions starts the date it is given. For example, if you were convicted on 21 June 1999 and received an eight month prison sentence, you would be free of sentence restrictions on 21 February 2000, regardless of whether you were released early on probation.



Considering Additional Factors

If your criminal record is such that we need to "consider additional factors" then we will use a points system to assist us in making our decision. The points system is based on the following principles:

* Look at the total record of all serious offences. A criminal record showing that there has been a pattern of serious offending over a number of years will be treated more seriously than a single episode of offending.
* Look at the total record of all other significant offences in the two to five year period prior to the application. A criminal record showing that there has been a pattern of other significant offences over a number of years will be treated more seriously than a single episode of offending.
* For the most recent offence, look at whether the applicant has received a caution or warning or, where there has been a conviction, look at the sentence given and the length of time from when the sentence ended beyond the minimum requirement of two or five years.

In applying the above principles to the circumstances of your case, we will give you credit:

* if you do not have a pattern of offending
* for every year you are clear from criminal activity (beyond the minimum two or five years)

Depending on the seriousness of your record, we may require a longer period than the minimum before we consider you suitable to be licensed. The number and length of sentences have a greater impact on your eligibility.

If we judge it necessary to refuse your licence after giving due consideration to these additional factors to your case, then we will write to you, providing the basis for our decision, and invite you to supply further information within twenty-one days. Further information may include any factual errors in assessment (for example, an error of identity, or an error in assessing your competence or criminal history) and mitigation. We will then consider your submissions when making our final decision.