Section 4 – Deletion of details of alternatives to prosecution for relevant offences
15.This section sets out the process for deleting details of alternatives to prosecution given for relevant offences. It applies to those alternatives to prosecution which were given before the date on which the Act comes into force. An alternative to prosecution includes a warning, a fiscal fine, and other ways in which a person can avoid prosecution by undertaking to do a particular thing instigated by the procurator fiscal.
16.Where the Scottish Ministers become aware of alternatives to prosecution that have been given for relevant offences, subsection (1) places a duty on them to notify Police Scotland and direct the chief constable to delete the relevant entry in the criminal history database. Subsection (2) requires the chief constable to do as directed as soon as reasonably practicable.
17.Subsections (3) and (4) make equivalent provision for alternatives to prosecution as subsections (4) and (5) of section 3 do for convictions: namely, they impose requirements in relation to notification to an appropriate person of a direction having been given in relation to correction of records, and they impose a requirement on the Scottish Ministers to consider any representations made to them that a person’s records ought to be corrected. See paragraphs 13 and 14 of these notes for more details of the equivalent provision in relation to convictions.
18.For the most part, details of alternatives to prosecution which have been given will not have any implications for the recipient after this length of time and this section will therefore be of little practical impact. For example, the details of an alternative to prosecution would not form part of a person’s record of ‘previous convictions’ tendered to a criminal court after this length of time. However, spent alternatives to prosecution are, in very limited circumstances, able to be disclosed in higher level disclosures (such as police vetting) so there will be a real life, if narrow, practical impact of these being deleted.
