Influencing policy: Unlock’s landmark challenge to the government’s criminal records disclosure regime

Do you want to learn about different organisations’ approaches to influencing government policy? Are you interested in developing your own organisation’s policy influencing strategy? If so, join us for our series of three online expert seminars.

The seminars are suitable for voluntary organisations with an interest in influencing policy - from those who are just starting on their influencing journey, to those that have a lot of experience who might want to pick up something new. They are designed to:

• Give an overview of what policy influencing is
• Hear about other organisations approaches to influencing policy
• Generate ideas about how to incorporate policy influencing into your own work.

The seminars are stand-alone events, delivered as part of the Stronger voice project. As part of the project, we will also be delivering a new training programme running in 2021- 2022 to further support organisations to understand the process of policy influencing, and how to increase influence and policy change.

This seminar will be led by Christopher Stacey. Christopher is currently the Co-Director of Unlock, an independent award-winning charity that provides a voice and support for people who are facing stigma and obstacles because of their criminal record. He leads the charity’s policy and advocacy work, and oversees the charity’s activities, projects and communications, including work to support and challenge employers to change their recruitment policies and practices, work to prevent unlawful criminal record checks, influencing government policy and working on other policy issues including access to higher education. He is one of the country’s foremost experts on the criminal record disclosure regime and the long-term barriers of criminal records. He led Unlock’s successful Crowd Justice campaign and legal intervention in a Supreme Court hearing on the disclosure of criminal records which led to changes in 2020 which meant thousands of people with old/minor criminal records no longer have to disclose them when applying for roles that involve higher-level DBS checks.

Other seminars in this series:

Influencing policy: Clinks’ approach as a membership organisation

Influencing policy: The role of influencing in Prison Reform Trust’s work