Professor Anthony Glees Dr Julian Richards University of ... - PCG

We are satisfied, as we say, that it is the explicit position of the government thatthis should not be occurring. The government reasonably points to its guidelineswhich spell out that a pre-existing clearance is not a requisite for the vastmajority of jobs on offer and, no less reasonably, it draws everyone‟s attentionto the efforts made (at some cost) to speed up the process so that the provisionof basic level security clearances can take no more than fifteen days in allroutine cases. Whilst this is a vast improvement to the situation that existedbefore, fifteen working days is in fact three weeks; any market-drivenrecruitment agency may well conclude that faced with some contractors whomight happen to have a pre-existing and valid clearance and some who mighthave to wait three weeks for one, it would make sense to automatically excludethe latter in favour of the former. Some recruitment agencies may use anexisting clearance as a filter to reduce the number of applications that it isrequired to read and assess, suspecting, not unreasonably, that the end-user willwant staff who can be placed quickly. Indeed at the time of writing there isstrong evidence, supported by anecdotal reports from key players in therecruitment industry, to suggest that it is widely accepted that clients will prefera candidate with clearance already in place. This problem is amplified in the caseof freelancers as very often the engagement may just be short term.This can happen easily, for example, when recruitment agencies are hit by aplethora of applications and introduce a finite window for them. Anecdotal butwholly credible evidence from the roundtable meeting suggests that existingclearances can be used as a form of pre-selection to further reduce the workload involved in short-listing applicants.Sometimes, the evidence indicates, the fault lies with the end user who maydemand a higher level of clearance than is necessary which in turn requires afreelancer who does not have a pre-existing clearance either to undergo vettingor indeed exclude themselves from the process even where they have veryspecific skills the government says it requires. Again, anecdotally, it is possiblethat both end user and recruitment agency may make this mistake, an almost18