Mnene v General Social Care Council [2007] EWCST 1063(SW) (6 December 2007) 

Evelyn Muthoni Mnene
Appellant
-v-

General Social Care Council
Respondent
[2007] 1063.SW

Before:

Mr Mark Rowland
Ms Judith Wade
Ms Bez Chatfield

Heard on 28 November 2007 at 18 Pocock Street, London SE1.

Mr Ian Miller, solicitor of Bevan Brittan LLP, appeared for the Respondent.

Mr Paul Onifade, solicitor of Crowther Solicitors, appeared for the Appellant.

DECISION

1.	We dismiss this appeal and confirm the decision of the Conduct Committee of the General Social Care Council dated 14 June 2007 to remove the Appellant’s registration from the register of social workers.

The facts

2.	The Appellant was born in Kenya in 1963.  She passed a two-year social work course at the Kenya Institute of Administration in 1989 and, according to her application to the General Council for Social Care for registration as a social worker in England, worked in Kenya until 1995 when she came to England with her son in order to care for her mother.  At some time before 1999, she claimed, and was awarded, income support, housing benefit and council tax benefit.

3.	Between 6 January 1999 and 18 November 1999, she worked as a care assistant for UK International Nursing Agency.  The precise extent of her work and whether she reported it to the benefits authorities are not matters that have been investigated by either the Respondent or us.

4.	On 26 April 1999, she started working as a care assistant at St Mary at the Cross Convent in Edgware, mostly on night duty caring for three elderly nuns.  Initially she worked for 18 hours a week.  She did not declare this employment to the benefits authorities until 2002, when she made the disclosure we describe below.

5.	On 11 June 2000, she submitted an application form for a job as a supported contact worker with Welcare Community Projects in Kilburn.  She stated that she worked at the Convent of St Mary at the Cross, 1019 High Road, Whetstone as a volunteer social worker “in their project for children” and had been working there since 1998.  She offered as a referee a Reverend David Anderson with an address at that convent.  A reference dated 30 July 2000 was duly provided on what appeared to be convent notepaper.  The Whetstone convent did not exist and the community at the Edgware convent has no knowledge of the Reverend David Anderson.  The Appellant was successful in her application and she worked at Welcare from July 2000 to October 2001 for 18 hours a week, in addition to her work at the Edgware convent.  It appears that she did not disclose her work at Welcare to the benefit authorities.

6.	She stopped working at Welcare because she had obtained full-time employment as a qualified social worker for the London Borough of Harrow.  In her job application form for that post, she described her role at Welcare as being a “family support manager” and said that this had involved “report writing” but the Finance and Administration Manager at Welcare says that that was not true.  She also claimed to have worked from January 1997 to June 2000 at the “St Mary at the Cross Children Rescue Centre”, 1019 High Road, as a project social worker.  She offered as one of her referees a Reverend David Githilson of 1019 High Road.  A reference dated 19 October 2001, apparently on convent notepaper, was duly provided in the name of the Reverend David Githilson.  There was no such rescue centre and this reference, too, was false. It stated that the Appellant had been “offering support to traumatised children, acting as a key worker for the children, assisting families during contact sessions and admitting children on emergency protection”.  The job had never existed.  The Appellant did not disclose to Harrow her work at the Edgware convent.  However, the Appellant was employed by Harrow from 10 December 2001.  She did not disclose that employment to the benefit authorities.

7.	The Appellant continued to receive income support until 19 April 2002 and she then claimed jobseeker’s allowance from 20 April 2002 until 3 November 2002.  The transfer was probably forced on her because she was no longer claiming benefit in respect of a child under the age of 16.  Her claim for jobseeker’s allowance was relatively short-lived and ended when she informed the jobcentre that she had obtained work at the Edgware convent for 30 hours a week, starting on 4 November 2002.  She provided the same information to the London Borough of Brent in connection with her claim for housing benefit and council tax benefit.  She provided as evidence two monthly payslips and a statement of earnings form purportedly completed by a nun.  Those documents were false.  The Appellant later supplied a false letter on convent notepaper, purportedly signed by the same nun, explaining that payslips could not be provided “because of the sudden illness of our accountant” but confirming the hours and rate of pay.  In fact the Appellant’s hours of work at the convent did increase at some time to 24 per week (two 12-hour night shifts).  The forged documents showed the Appellant working 30 hours a week but at a lower hourly rate than she was actually paid for her night shifts.  A full explanation for the forgeries has not been given but it is possible that the Appellant had found claiming jobseeker’s allowance, which would have involved “signing on” once a fortnight, rather complicated given her work with Harrow and that she forged the documents as a way of explaining her ceasing to claim jobseeker’s allowance while not disclosing her employment at Harrow and not disclosing that she had been employed by the convent before November 2002.

8.	The deceit worked for a while.  However, in October 2003, a data-matching exercise revealed to Brent’s Revenue and Benefits Service that the Appellant was working for Harrow.  Further enquiries revealed the fact that she had been working there since 2001.  The Revenue and Benefits Service then took a closer look at the documents they already held in respect of the claims for benefit and noticed irregularities in the Appellant’s declared earnings from the convent.  They therefore contacted the convent and discovered that the Appellant had in fact been working there since 1999 and that the documentation provided in 2002 and 2003 had been false.

9.	The convent, of course, also discovered the deceit and dismissed the Appellant on grounds of dishonesty on 21 February 2004.

10.	The Appellant was told that Brent had reason to believe her claim was fraudulent and she was invited to attend an interview conducted in accordance with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.  She attended the interview on 3 March 2004 with a solicitor and declined to answer any questions.  It was subsequently calculated that she had been overpaid £27,462.80 housing benefit from 3 May 1999 to 30 October 2004 and £1,601.08 council tax benefit from 3 May 1999 to 16 November 2003.  The documents do not explain how housing benefit continued to be overpaid until 30 October 2004, but the point is immaterial.  The Department for Work and Pensions calculated that the Appellant had also been overpaid £11,890.90 income support from 1 May 1999 to 19 April 2002 and £1,490.03 jobseeker’s allowance from 20 April 2002 to 3 November 2002.

11.	Harrow had also discovered from Brent both that the Appellant had been claiming benefit and that she had been working at the convent.  When they contacted the convent themselves, they discovered that the reference purportedly given by the Reverend David Githilson was false.  On 10 March 2004, the Appellant submitted her resignation.  It was not accepted immediately and the Appellant was suspended until 22 April 2004, when her resignation was accepted.  This followed an investigatory interview in which the Appellant played down the significance of the Brent investigation and sought unsatisfactorily to explain the false reference.

12.	On 5 May 2004, Harrow referred the Appellant’s case to the Secretary of State for inclusion on the list maintained under the Protection of Children Act 1999.  This reference resulted in the Appellant being provisionally included on both the POCA and the POVA lists from 5 October 2004 to 13 July 2005.  When it was decided not to keep her name on the POCA and POVA lists, those maintaining the lists considered that the matters raised by Harrow’s referral would more appropriately be dealt with by the Respondent and so they forwarded Harrow’s letter of referral to the Respondent.  The Respondent invited Harrow to make a formal complaint about the Appellant’s conduct, which was done on 1 August 2005.  On 30 September 2005, the Respondent informed the Appellant that it had received the complaint and was investigating it.

13.	Meanwhile, the Appellant had registered with Social Work 2000, who prepared a CV on the basis of information she supplied to them and through whom she obtained work as a social worker with Bedfordshire County Council from 31 August 2004 to 16 September 2005, first in Biggleswade and then in Dunstable.  She provided false information.  In particular, she did not disclose that she had worked for the Edgware convent, for Welcare and for Harrow.  On her registration form she said that she had been employed by UK International Nursing Agency as a support worker from February 2002 until July 2002 and in her CV she said that she had worked for that agency as a live-in healthcare assistant from August 2002 to August 2004, when in fact she had worked for that agency only as a care assistant from January 1999 to November 1999.  Her CV claimed that she had been unemployed from November 2001 to February 2002 and had been out of social work for nine years.  She did not inform either Social Work 2000 or Bedfordshire County Council that she had been interviewed in respect of the housing benefit and council tax benefit fraud and she did not inform them when she was placed on the POCA and POVA lists or when she received a summons to appear at Harrow magistrates’ court on 5 September 2005 in relation to the housing benefit and council tax benefit fraud.

14.	In April 2005, it had become necessary for social workers to be registered by the Respondent under Part IV of the Care Standards Act 2000.  The Appellant duly submitted an application for registration in March 2005.  That application contained the same misrepresentations as to her employment by the UK International Nursing Agency as she had made to Social Work 2000 and again failed to disclose her employment by Welcare, Harrow and the Edgware convent and stated that she had been unemployed from November 2001 to February 2002.  She did not mention that she had been under investigation in respect of the benefit fraud.  She was registered on 27 May 2005.  (For reasons we need not explain, the Appellant was registered without consideration of the comparability of her Kenyan qualification with UK qualifications.  We observe that there appears to be no explicit provision for reviewing a mistaken registration where the mistake was not caused by proven misconduct but by the possibly innocent provision of inaccurate information.)  Having been registered, the Appellant failed to mention that she had been provisionally included on the POCA and POVA lists and she also failed to inform the Respondent when she received the summons to appear at the magistrates’ court and when she ceased working for Social Work 2000 on 16 September 2005.

15.	Shortly before her employment with Social Work 2000 came to an end, the Appellant completed an application pack for Bluecare Social Care, a recruitment agency, who interviewed her and prepared a CV that was sent to the London Boroughs of Haringey and Barnet.  In the CV, she did not disclose her employment with the Edgware convent and she claimed to have worked for the UK International Nursing Agency from 1995 to July 2000.  This time, however, she did disclose her work for Welcare and Harrow.  As respects Harrow, her CV said she started work in December 2000, rather than December 2001, but, although the Appellant has admitted misconduct in relation to this error, it seems to us that this particular misrepresentation may have been an innocent mistake because the correct date was disclosed on her application form as was the fact that she had been employed by Welcare until October 2001 and the CV itself stated that she remained employed by Welcare until 2001.

16.	She provided the names of two professional referees from Bedfordshire and another referee who had been a colleague at Harrow.  This colleague provided a favourable reference, without any mention of the reason for the Appellant leaving, presumably because she did not know.  The Appellant also provided an unsigned and undated “Agreed Reference” from Harrow, stating that there had been no major concerns about her practice as a social worker and then stating –

“As part of a matching exercise concerns were raised in respect to a reference supplied as part of her application for the post of Qualified Social Worker.  This required the Council to commence a disciplinary Investigation.  On the 10th March 2004, just as the Investigation commenced, Evelyn submitted a letter of resignation.  After the Initial Investigation it was decided to accept the resignation with immediate effect and, therefore, not to finish the Investigation.”

Whether Harrow in fact agreed that form of words is not clear but we note that no reference is made to the investigation having also been concerned with the allegation that the Appellant had made a fraudulent claim for housing benefit while working for Harrow and the Edgware convent.  When a consultant at Bluecare wrote to Harrow, he received a letter confirming the dates of her employment and inviting him to contact them if he had any further queries.  However, he accepted the Appellant’s explanation that she had left because she had not been getting on with members of the team and so he did not seek further details from Harrow.  The Appellant did not inform Bluecare that she had been interviewed by both Brent and Harrow in connection with the benefit fraud or that she had received a summons and had appeared at the magistrates’ court in relation to the fraud.  Bluecare found the Appellant work at the London Borough of Barnet, starting on 29 September 2005.  She did not tell Barnet that criminal proceedings had been brought against her.

17.	The inaccurate CV prepared by Social Work 2000 in the light of information provided to them by the Appellant appears to have been the basis of an equally inaccurate CV that the Appellant herself provided to EM Recruitment on 6 January 2006.  EM Recruitment sent the CV to Haringey but heard no more from the Appellant.

18.	On 9 January 2006, the Appellant pleaded guilty at Harrow Crown Court to eight counts of false accounting and two of producing or furnishing false documents or information. These all related to the claims for housing benefit and council tax benefit, the Department for Work and Pensions not having joined in the prosecution.  On 6 February 2006, she was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment on each count, to be served concurrently.  At no time had the Appellant informed the Respondent, Bluecare or Barnet that the proceedings were pending and she also did not tell any of them that she had been sent to prison.  However, Barnet discovered about the Appellant’s convictions and sentence from a newspaper report and passed the information to Bluecare.  The Respondent certainly knew that the Appellant was in prison by 4 April 2006.

19.	The Appellant was released from prison in June 2006, by which time the Respondent’s investigation into the conduct complaint was nearing completion.  On 7 July 2006, an interim suspension order was made by the Preliminary Proceedings Committee of the Respondent and a further such order was made on 19 December 2006.  A formal list of allegations was prepared by the Respondent.  We need not set it out in full.  It covered the various matters we have outlined above, save that it did not include any allegations concerning the obtaining of employment at Welcare or concerning the overpayments of income support and jobseeker’s allowance.

20.	On 14 June 2007, the Appellant, having admitted all the allegations made against her, appeared before the Conduct Committee of the Respondent.  The Committee found misconduct proved and then considered paragraph 25 of Schedule 2 to the General Social Care Council (Conduct) Rules 2003 (made under section 59 of the Care Standards Act 2000), which provides –

 “(1) 	Upon a finding of Misconduct, the Committee may:
    (a) 	admonish the Registrant and direct that a record of the admonishment be placed on the Registrant’s Entry in the Register, for a period of up to five years; or
    (b) 	make an Order suspending the Registrant’s registration for a period not exceeding two years (‘ a Suspension Order’); or
    (c) 	make an Order for removal of the Registrant’s registration from the Register (‘ a Removal Order’).
    (d) 	revoke any Interim Suspension Order imposed by the Preliminary Proceedings Committee.

  (2) 	In deciding what sanction is to be imposed, the Committee shall take into account:
    (a) 	the seriousness of the Registrant’s Misconduct;
    (b) 	the protection of the public;
    (c) 	the public interest in maintaining confidence in social care services; and
    (d) 	the issue of proportionality.

  (3) 	The Committee shall announce its decision on sanctions in public, and shall give reasons for its decision.

  (4) 	Any decision of the Committee shall take effect as soon as it is made.”

21.	It made an order for the removal of the Appellant’s registration from the register of social workers and revoked the current interim suspension order.

22.	The Appellant now appeals against the removal order.

Preliminary issues

23.	We raised at the beginning of the hearing three preliminary issues.  Given the view we take of the case as a whole, they do not call for resolution in this particular case, but they raise points of general importance to which we wish to draw attention, as this is apparently the first appeal of its type to be brought before a tribunal.

The powers of the tribunal

24.	Section 68 of the 2000 Act provides – 
 
“(1) 	An appeal against a decision of a Council under this Part in respect of registration shall lie to the Tribunal. 

  (2) 	On an appeal against a decision, the Tribunal may confirm the decision or direct that it shall not have effect. 

  (3) 	The Tribunal shall also have power on an appeal against a decision— 
    (a) 	to vary any condition for the time being in force in respect of the person to whom the appeal relates; 
    (b) 	to direct that any such condition shall cease to have effect; or 
    (c) 	to direct that any such condition as it thinks fit shall have effect in respect of that person.”

25.	Mr Miller submitted that an appeal before a tribunal is by way of a rehearing.  In our judgment, this is correct: all issues are at large and, generally, a tribunal has the same powers as the Committee against whose decision the appeal is brought being, for instance, constrained by paragraph 25(2) of Schedule 2 to the Rules although having its own procedural rules.

26.	Mr Miller also submitted that the effect of section 68(2) is that, if a tribunal decides that a removal order shall not have effect, it has no power to substitute another of the sanctions listed in paragraph of 25(1) of Schedule 2 to the Rules.  Mr Onifade submitted that subsection (3) permitted an alternative sanction to be imposed but we are not persuaded that the term “condition” includes such a sanction.  It is difficult to regard any of the sanctions as being a condition and the draftsman presumably had in mind the conditions that may be attached to registration under section 58(1).  We agree with Mr Miller that the tribunal has no power itself formally to impose a sanction or to direct the Conduct Committee to impose a particular sanction.

27.	The question that then arises is whether, if a tribunal allows an appeal against the imposition of a sanction, it ought generally to state what alternative sanction should be imposed and whether, if it does so, the Respondent should regard itself as bound by what the tribunal says so that, although it is the Respondent’s Conduct Committee that formally imposes the sanction, it would do so without any further consideration of the case.  The alternative would be that both parties would have the expense of a further hearing and the possibility of a further appeal.  

28.	We suggest that next time there is an appeal against a decision of the Conduct Committee, the Respondent should make a submission on this point for consideration by the tribunal.

New allegations

29.	We raised with Mr Miller the question whether we could have regard to dishonesty revealed by the evidence before us that had not been the subject of specific allegations by the Respondent before the Conduct Committee.  In particular, the false career information and false reference provided to Welcare were not the subject of an allegation and neither were the overpayments of income support and jobseeker’s allowance occasioned by the Appellant’s failure to disclose to the Department of Social Security and its successor, the Department for Work and Pensions, her employment by the Edgware convent and Harrow.  Moreover, the overpayment of housing benefit and council tax benefit seems to have been calculated without Brent ever having been aware of the Appellant’s employment by Welcare.

30.	Mr Miller replied that after a certain point there were diminishing returns from adding more allegations against an appellant.  Once sufficient allegations had been made to justify a removal order, there were advantages in not adding further allegation, which would prolong proceedings and require further investigation and the production of more evidence.  We see the force in those points but we suggest that one countervailing consideration is that a full record of misconduct may be desirable if there is, as there often will be, the possibility of a future application for restoration to the register.

31.	In any event, Mr Miller suggested that procedural fairness to an appellant required a tribunal to have regard only to those allegations substantiated before the Conduct Committee.  We agree that procedural fairness is paramount and we also consider that a tribunal should not be over-zealous in raising new matters, but we are not entirely convinced that, provided an appellant is given a proper opportunity to respond to any new allegations, it could never be fair for new allegations to be raised in proceedings before a tribunal in a case where they might make a material difference to the outcome and dealing with them would obviate the need to bring fresh proceedings before the Conduct Committee.

32.	However, in the present case, we agree with Mr Miller that the additional matters to which we have drawn attention would not affect the outcome and we are content to determine this appeal on the basis that the only relevant allegations are those admitted by the Appellant in the proceedings before the Conduct Committee.

Failure to disclose

33.	Where it is alleged that there has been a failure to disclose a material fact, it is necessary for it to be shown that there was a duty to disclose the fact.  Some duties are statutory but more commonly they arise because specific questions are asked or specific instructions are given through, for instance, terms of employment or codes of conduct.  We indicated to Mr Miller that, if the Appellant had not admitted misconduct in failing to disclose in her application for registration by the Respondent the fact that she had been interviewed in connection with the benefit fraud, which implies that she understood that she needed to make the disclosure, we might have required some persuasion that she had been under any duty to disclose that fact.  No relevant question was asked on the application form and a year had passed since the interview without any action having been taken by Brent.  We express no view as to whether it would be desirable to include on the form a question about criminal investigations.  Given that some people interviewed in connection with crimes are innocent, that there is no formal identification of people as suspects (as recent press reports suggest is done in Portugal) and that people are not always warned that prosecution is being considered, framing a suitable question might not be easy.

34.	We did, however, suggest to Mr Miller that the Respondent might give consideration to including in the Code of Conduct a general duty on a social care worker to inform the Respondent (and any employer) if criminal proceedings have been started against him or her.

The parties’ submissions and our conclusions

35.	Because the Appellant had legal representation and did not contest the facts of the case and because Mr Miller had submitted a skeleton argument setting out the Respondent’s case clearly and had provided all the evidence in written form with copies of relevant authorities, we did not call upon Mr Miller to open the case before us.  In his skeleton argument, he submitted that the approach taken to the imposition of sanctions against solicitors found guilty of misconduct applied equally to social workers and he referred to Bolton v. Law Society [1994] 1 W.L.R. 512.  That was a case where a solicitor had misused clients’ money but in circumstances that did not represent a deliberate course of dishonest conduct.  The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal suspended him from practice for two years.  On appeal, the Divisional Court substituted a fine but, on a further appeal by the Law Society, the Court of Appeal reinstated the original decision.  In the course of his judgment, Sir Thomas Bingham MR, with whom the other members of the Court agreed, said –

“13.	It is required of lawyers practising in this country that they should discharge their professional duties with integrity, probity and complete trustworthiness.   …

14.	Any solicitor who is shown to have discharged his professional duties with anything less than complete integrity, probity and trustworthiness must expect severe sanctions to be imposed upon him by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. Lapses from the required high standard may, of course, take different forms and be of varying degrees. The most serious involves proven dishonesty, whether or not leading to criminal proceedings and criminal penalties. In such cases the Tribunal has almost invariably, no matter how strong the mitigation advanced for the solicitor, ordered that he be struck off the Roll of Solicitors. Only infrequently, particularly in recent years, has it been willing to order the restoration to the Roll of a solicitor against whom serious dishonesty had been established, even after a passage of years, and even where the solicitor had made every effort to re-establish himself and redeem his reputation. If a solicitor is not shown to have acted dishonestly, but is shown to have fallen below the required standards of integrity, probity and trustworthiness, his lapse is less serious but it remains very serious indeed in a member of a profession whose reputation depends upon trust. A striking off order will not necessarily follow in such a case, but it may well. The decision whether to strike off or to suspend will often involve a fine and difficult exercise of judgment, to be made by the Tribunal as an informed and expert body on all the facts of the case. Only in a very unusual and venial case of this kind would the Tribunal be likely to regard as appropriate any order less severe than one of suspension.

15.	It is important that there should be full understanding of the reasons why the Tribunal makes orders which might otherwise seem harsh. There is, in some of these orders, a punitive element: a penalty may be visited on a solicitor who has fallen below the standards required of his profession in order to punish him for what he has done and to deter any other solicitor tempted to behave in the same way. Those are traditional objects of punishment. But often the order is not punitive in intention. Particularly is this so where a criminal penalty has been imposed and satisfied. The solicitor has paid his debt to society. There is no need, and it would be unjust, to punish him again. In most cases the order of the Tribunal will be primarily directed to one or other or both of two other purposes. One is to be sure that the offender does not have the opportunity to repeat the offence. This purpose is achieved for a limited period by an order of suspension; plainly it is hoped that experience of suspension will make the offender meticulous in his future compliance with the required standards. The purpose is achieved for a longer period, and quite possibly indefinitely, by an order of striking off. The second purpose is the most fundamental of all: to maintain the reputation of the solicitors' profession as one in which every member, of whatever standing, may be trusted to the ends of the earth. To maintain this reputation and sustain public confidence in the integrity of the profession it is often necessary that those guilty of serious lapses are not only expelled but denied re-admission. If a member of the public sells his house, very often his largest asset, and entrusts the proceeds to his solicitor, pending re-investment in another house, he is ordinarily entitled to expect that the solicitor will be a person whose trustworthiness is not, and never has been, seriously in question. Otherwise, the whole profession, and the public as a whole, is injured. A profession's most valuable asset is its collective reputation and the confidence which that inspires.

16.	Because orders made by the Tribunal are not primarily punitive, it follows that considerations which would ordinarily weigh in mitigation of punishment have less effect on the exercise of this jurisdiction than on the ordinary run of sentences imposed in criminal cases. It often happens that a solicitor appearing before the Tribunal can adduce a wealth of glowing tributes from his professional brethren. He can often show that for him and his family the consequences of striking off or suspension would be little short of tragic. Often he will say, convincingly, that he has learned his lesson and will not offend again. On applying for restoration after striking off, all these points may be made, and the former solicitor may also be able to point to real efforts made to re-establish himself and redeem his reputation. All these matters are relevant and should be considered. But none of them touches the essential issue, which is the need to maintain among members of the public a well-founded confidence that any solicitor whom they instruct will be a person of unquestionable integrity, probity and trustworthiness. Thus it can never be an objection to an order of suspension in an appropriate case that the solicitor may be unable to re-establish his practice when the period of suspension is past. If that proves, or appears likely to be, so the consequence for the individual and his family may be deeply unfortunate and unintended. But it does not make suspension the wrong order if it is otherwise right. The reputation of the profession is more important than the fortunes of any individual member. Membership of a profession brings many benefits, but that is a part of the price.”

That approach has been applied in relation to other professions (see Tait v. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons [2003] UKPC 34; Archbold v. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons [2004] UKPC 1 and Regina (Smith) v. General Teaching Council for England [2007] EWHC 1675 (Admin)).

36.	Mr Onifade submitted that the approach to dishonest conduct in Bolton had not been applied by the Respondent’s Conduct Committee and he referred to three particular cases.  However, those cases are very different from the present.  In two, the social worker had failed to disclose convictions that were twenty or more years old and none of which had resulted in a sentence of immediate imprisonment.  In the third, the social worker had failed to disclose a conviction relating to tax credits in respect of which the social worker had been fined £250 in a magistrates’ court.  Sir Thomas Bingham MR did not say that dishonesty should always result in a solicitor being struck off, or even suspended, and in our judgment the decisions of the Conduct Committee to which Mr Onifade referred are not inconsistent with his approach.  They are examples of cases where a refusal to register or a removal order is not necessarily the appropriate sanction.  Paragraph 25(2)(iv) of Schedule 2 to the Rules does, after all, require sanctions to be proportionate and the Conduct Committee is entitled to regard very minor, or very old, convictions as ones that should not result in the severest sanction and it is also entitled to regard the failure to disclose such a conviction as also being less heinous than the failure to disclose more serious convictions.  We agree with Mr Miller that Sir Thomas Bingham MR’s approach to professional discipline is as apt for social workers as for solicitors.  Clients, courts, benefit authorities and all those with whom social workers must deal are entitled to expect social workers to be entirely honest.  Their code of conduct explicitly requires honesty and trustworthiness.

37.	The dishonesty in the present case is neither minor nor old.  The housing benefit and council tax benefit offences in respect of which the Appellant was convicted were on a very substantial scale and they were not simply a case of never getting round to disclosing a change of circumstances.  They involved the provision of false information and a calculated deception requiring the forging of documents.

38.	From the point of view of her profession, the Appellant’s dishonesty in respect of her various job applications is just as serious.  Her application to Harrow again involved a calculated deception in the production of a false reference.  She lied about her experience and the consequence was that she was given work that she had not been properly trained to do, thus putting the public at risk, and she may well have been given the job in preference to a better-qualified applicant.  It is no coincidence that, although much of her work was regarded as satisfactory, report writing was seen as a weakness by more than one employer.  The failure to disclose her employment with the Edgware convent enabled her to work two long night shifts while also working full-time for Harrow and it is hardly surprising that the Mother Abbess thought that the Appellant’s standards of care had deteriorated.  After the Appellant’s dishonesty was discovered by Brent, Harrow and the Edgware convent, the Appellant went to considerable trouble to cover her tracks.

39.	Mr Onifade submitted that there was mitigation in this case and that admonishment or suspension would be an adequate penalty.  He referred to the mitigation statement made to the Conduct Committee.  The Conduct Committee took it into account, while noting that there was little evidence to support it.  The sentencing judge was also prepared to accept that the Appellant had had her personal troubles.  However, even the Appellant accepts that they do not excuse her conduct.

40.	Mr Onifade said that the Appellant had admitted her guilt at the earliest opportunity.  It is true that she did so before the Conduct Committee and that she also pleaded guilty in the Crown Court.  However, she made no admission when interviewed by Brent, she tried to bluff her way out of Harrow’s investigation and she then lied to other employers to hide what she had done.  There is little mitigation in admissions that are made only when the person concerned has been confronted with overwhelming evidence.

41.	Mr Onifade also submitted that the Appellant was unlikely to repeat her offences.  He pointed to the fact that she had written letters of apology to Harrow and the Edgware convent, had disclosed her bankruptcy to the Respondent and that she had pointed out to the Criminal Records Bureau that disclosure made to an employer was inaccurate as it failed to show her convictions.  Against the history of dishonesty in this case, those actions are not sufficient to enable it to be said with confidence that the Appellant is unlikely to be dishonest again.  That is the problem with dishonesty.  Once trust is broken it is not easily repaired.  And dishonesty in a social worker may put the public at risk.

42.	In any event, even if we were more confident than we are that the Appellant was a reformed character and that the public would not be put at risk if she were to be employed again as a social worker, we would still regard the removal of the Appellant’s registration as the appropriate sanction in this case.  Applying the approach taken in Bolton, a removal order is clearly appropriate and proportionate in this case, having regard to the seriousness of the misconduct and the public interest in maintaining confidence in social care services.

43.	It is difficult to conceive of circumstances in which a person recently convicted of offences of dishonesty that are so serious as to attract an immediate nine-month prison sentence should not be removed from the register.  It is also difficult to conceive of circumstances in which the provision of an entirely false reference for a social work job and the repeated provision of inaccurate employment histories in connection with applications for such jobs will not merit removal from the register.

44.	In our judgment, the Conduct Committee imposed the only sanction it could reasonably have imposed in the circumstances of this case.  We confirm its decision.

Mr Mark Rowland
Nominated Chairman
Ms Judith Wade
Ms Bez Chatfield

Date:  6 December 2007