Claimant v First Defendant & Ors

Evidence of a spent conviction may be admitted in civil proceedings only where the statutory threshold is met: justice must require its admission. A conviction does not, without more, establish dishonesty, moral turpitude or a relevant propensity. Nor does the fact of conviction ordinarily assist in assessing credit where the circumstances of the underlying offence remain unknown and are consistent with innocent conduct. The court must distinguish the conviction itself and ancillary circumstances from other, independently relevant questions about a witness’s past. Admission should therefore be refused where the conviction has no real probative value on an issue or provides no rational basis for questioning credibility.

The claimant challenged her mother’s apparent last will, alleging that the First Defendant, her brother, had procured its execution by undue influence or had tricked the testatrix into signing it without knowledge and approval. The claimant sought permission to rely on the First Defendant’s 1995 conviction under the then applicable national insurance legislation. The conviction was spent. The First Defendant applied for references to it to be redacted from the claimant’s witness statement.

The central issue was whether the conviction, the surrounding newspaper report and related material could satisfy the statutory test for admitting evidence of a spent conviction in civil proceedings.

1. Applications. The claimant’s application to admit evidence of the First Defendant’s spent conviction was dismissed. The First Defendant’s application to redact references to it from the witness statement was allowed.
2. Under section 7(3) of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, the court may admit evidence relating to a spent conviction only where it is satisfied, having regard to relevant considerations, that justice cannot be done without admitting it. The provision gives the court a broad discretion, but the conviction must have genuine relevance to an issue or to credit.
3. The conviction arose under the old versions of sections 114 and 115 of the Social Security Administration Act 1992. Those provisions did not require dishonesty to be proved. Section 115 imposed liability on a director where the company’s offence was proved to have been committed with the director’s consent or connivance, or was attributable to the director’s neglect.
4. The conviction was therefore consistent both with dishonesty and with entirely honest conduct. The references to crooked directors, phoenix companies and evasion in the newspaper article did not establish dishonesty. Describing non-payment as evasion assumed the very issue which the claimant had to prove.
5. The conviction itself provided no meaningful evidence of propensity and no, or at most the slightest, assistance on credit. The underlying failure to pay contributions might have resulted from adverse trading conditions and insolvency. It was consequently wrong to admit the conviction or ancillary circumstances, or to use them as the basis for cross-examination.
6. The ruling was confined to evidence relating to the spent conviction and circumstances ancillary to it. It did not prevent questions about the First Defendant’s past which could be answered without acknowledging or referring to the spent conviction, subject to ordinary relevance principles.