Full Fact writes to Keir Starmer over claim two former Conservative leaders ‘had convictions’
Sir Keir Starmer has been facing calls to correct the record after a claim he made at last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions about two former PMs having “convictions”.
In the exchange on 4 December, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch asked about the departure of Louise Haigh from the role of transport secretary, after it emerged Ms Haigh had pleaded guilty to a fraud offence prior to becoming an MP. Mr Starmer replied to Ms Badenoch saying: “I gently remind her that two of her predecessors had convictions for breaking the Covid rules.”
Mr Starmer was referring to the Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs) issued to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak in April 2022 for breaking lockdown rules during the Covid pandemic.
His comments have been widely criticised, with Ms Badenoch and Mr Johnson suggesting that he misled the House.
It is true, as was widely reported in the wake of Mr Starmer’s comments last week, that FPNs are not classed as criminal convictions. They do not result in a criminal record so long as they are paid within a set time limit.
Mr Starmer did not actually refer to “criminal convictions” though, just “convictions”, so we’ve taken some time to look further into how that term is used. (It’s worth noting Mr Starmer has reportedly used the same wording previously.)
The evidence we’ve seen generally appears to suggest Mr Starmer’s use of the word “conviction” was misleading, though we’ve not been able to find a universally agreed definition of the term. We’ve asked Number 10 about his comments but not had any response, so we’ve today written to Mr Starmer about his claim.
FPNs were first introduced under the Road Traffic and Roads Improvement Act 1960. Announcing them in the Commons, transport minister Ernest Marples said: “If the person pays the penalty there will be no conviction and no sentence.”
This was echoed in the wording of the Covid rules—for example,
The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (No. 3) Regulations 2020 stated: “A fixed penalty notice is a notice offering the person to whom it is issued the opportunity of discharging any liability to conviction for the offence by payment of a fixed penalty to an authority specified in the notice.”
A 2010 finding by the Court of Appeal Criminal Division [R v Hamer [2010] EWCA Crim 2053] held that an FPN under the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 should not be regarded as a conviction. The case was quoted in Parliament in defence of Mr Johnson in the aftermath of his Covid fine.
When we asked the Ministry of Justice, it told us there is no universally agreed definition of a conviction, but that FPNs are ‘out of court disposals’. Official statistics published by the Ministry of Justice do not appear to include Fixed Penalty Notices in their count of the number of convictions.
A Home Office guide to police powers defines a “conviction” as “when a person is found guilty of an offence in a court”, which does not apply to FPNs. And when we asked the Metropolitan Police, the force which issued the Covid fines to Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak, it told us: “A[n] FPN is not a conviction.”
Professor David Ormerod KC, Chair in Criminal Law at UCL, told us he was “confident that FPNs are not treated as convictions”, but added: “In common discourse I suspect people do regard FPN and PNDs [Penalty Notices for Disorder] as convictions of a sort.”
Stuart Nolan, chair of the Law Society’s Criminal Law Committee, told us his “personal view” was that “an FPN is a de-facto conviction”. Mr Nolan said this was because they were “a sanction imposed for an offence which they did not contest, exercised in a criminal jurisdiction”, though he also acknowledged that it was “debatable whether [the FPNs] would be considered ‘convictions’ by most people”.
The letter we’ve written to Mr Starmer asks him to justify his use of the term “conviction”, or to correct the record. We will publish an update on this blog when we hear back.