Community Resolution Orders and DBS Checks: What You Need to Know

Tom Street, 8 January 2026

A misconduct hearing this week found that a Leicestershire police officer would have been sacked for issuing a community resolution order to a woman without ever speaking to her. The details sound almost absurd: Louise Gather went to Bradgate Park looking for rare mushrooms, didn’t pick any, and ended up with a police record that could have cost her her job.

But beneath the headlines about mushroom foraging lies a serious employment law issue that affects thousands of people every year.

What actually happened

In November 2024, Bradgate Park Trust called police about a woman they believed was picking mushrooms. PC Christopher Vickers later attended Mrs Gather’s home, but instead of speaking to her directly, he gave the paperwork to her husband and left. He then falsified the police database, recording that he had spoken to Mrs Gather, that she had admitted the offence, and that she had accepted a community resolution.

None of that was true. The misconduct panel found his actions were “dishonest, deliberate, and had the potential to damage police confidence.”

More importantly for Mrs Gather, Leicestershire Police acknowledged in their report that she “could have lost her job had the CR remained on her enhanced DBS checks.”

What is a community resolution?

A community resolution is the lowest level disposal available to police. It’s meant for minor offences where the alleged offender admits responsibility and agrees to some form of informal resolution, such as an apology, compensation, or an acceptable behaviour contract.

Crucially, a community resolution is not a conviction, not a caution, and does not create a criminal record in the traditional sense. It’s not recorded on the Police National Computer in the same way convictions are.

However, it is recorded on local police information systems. And that’s where the employment problem begins.

How community resolutions affect DBS checks

There are three levels of DBS check: basic, standard, and enhanced. Community resolutions will never appear on a basic or standard check.

But enhanced DBS checks are different. These are required for anyone working with children or vulnerable adults: teachers, nurses, care workers, social workers, medical professionals, and many others. An enhanced check includes not just convictions and cautions, but also “other relevant information” that the Chief Police Officer considers ought to be disclosed.

This is where community resolutions can surface. If the police believe the information is relevant to the role you’re applying for, they can include it in the “other relevant information” section of an enhanced DBS certificate.

In practice, disclosure of community resolutions is rare. The charity Unlock, which advises people with criminal records, says it has rarely seen community resolutions disclosed this way. But “rare” is not the same as “never,” and the decision lies entirely with the Chief Police Officer. There’s no automatic filtering rule that protects you.

Why this matters for employment

If you work in a regulated profession, an entry on your enhanced DBS check can be devastating. Many employers operate blanket policies: any disclosed information results in withdrawal of a job offer, regardless of context. Even where employers are more nuanced, the presence of “other relevant information” creates doubt, and doubt often resolves against the candidate.

Mrs Gather was lucky. The story attracted press attention, Leicestershire Police investigated, and the record was removed. But consider how easily this could have gone differently. She might never have known the record existed until she applied for a new job and was rejected. She might have been told simply that she had “failed” the DBS check, with no explanation. She might have spent months wondering why she couldn’t get work in her field.

This is the reality for people caught up in administrative errors, malicious allegations, or, as in this case, an officer taking shortcuts “for his own convenience.”

What you can do if this affects you

If you’re concerned about what might appear on your DBS check, you have options.

Make a subject access request. You can request this from your local police force. It will tell you what information they hold about you on their local systems. It won’t tell you exactly what they would disclose on a specific DBS check, but it gives you visibility of what’s there.

Ask for incorrect records to be removed. If you believe information has been wrongly recorded, you can ask the police to remove or amend it. There’s no formal right to have a community resolution “expunged,” but forces do consider such requests, particularly where the record was created improperly or a significant time has passed.

Dispute a DBS disclosure. If information is disclosed on an enhanced DBS check and you believe the disclosure was wrong, you can dispute it through the DBS. The Independent Monitor can review whether the disclosure decision was appropriate. In the Supreme Court case of R (L) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [2009], the Court held that police must balance the employer’s interests against the individual’s right to private life. Disclosures that fail to strike that balance can be challenged.

Consider your legal options. If you lose a job or job offer because of wrongly disclosed information, there may be grounds for a claim. This is a developing area, but claims have succeeded against both police forces (for wrongful disclosure) and employers (for making decisions based on flawed information without proper consideration).

My view

Cases like this are more common than people realise. The system can leave people blindsided by information appearing on DBS checks: allegations that were never proven, incidents that were investigated and closed, and administrative errors that nobody bothered to fix. The system operates largely invisibly until it suddenly derails someone’s career.

What happened to Mrs Gather is an extreme example of process failure. An officer fabricated a record because he couldn’t be bothered to do the job properly. But the underlying problem is more widespread: police information systems contain vast amounts of data, much of it never tested in court, and the decision to disclose it on a DBS check is made by police officers with limited oversight.

The misconduct panel got the outcome right in this case. But how many people are out there who didn’t get press coverage, didn’t trigger an investigation, and are still carrying records they don’t know about?

If you work in a sector requiring enhanced DBS checks, it’s worth knowing what the police hold on you before you need to find out the hard way.