Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) certificates issued: FOI release

Information requested

You asked for:

1. Statistics on the number of PVG certificates issued and those that are not clean sheets i.e. no problems but have "soft information' such as procurator fiscal warnings, incidents that were investigated (but did not go to court).

2. Figures on the total number of PVGs issued so I can get a sense of percentages.

3. Figures on the numbers of PVG disclosures which have had information included under Convictions and Cautions?

After a request for clarification from ourselves, you confirmed that you were looking for the above information to cover totals over the last three years.

Response

The answer to your questions are detailed below. The statistics relate to the period from 01 April 2016 to 31 March 2019.

1. Around 1,210 PVG certificates were issued during this period which contained “soft information”. 

2. In total, just over 884,680 PVG certificates were issued during this period.

3. Note that data for cautions is not available as this information is not supplied on a consistent basis by the various UK police forces. Also note that most cautions are deemed to have been rehabilitated three months after they were given and are therefore excluded from disclosure certificates in the vast majority of instances.

Just under 39,230 PVG certificates were issued during this period which had conviction information included.

4. Based on the figures above,

• The percentage of PVG certificates issued during this period which contained “soft information” was 0.14%
• The percentage of PVG certificates issued which had information included under convictions during this period was 4.43%

Notes: Numbers of certificates are rounded to the nearest 10. Percentages are based on unrounded figures.

About FOI
The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.