Construction employment deny list
“I’ve been angry for so long. It affects your character and demeanour – it’s the fact it’s so blatantly unjust … I’ve been at snapping point a few times. You’ve got a job, then you haven’t got a job. You get to the stage where you think: should I bother?”
Steve Acheson, an electrician from Denton, east Manchester, speaking to the Guardian.
In February 2009, when investigators from the Information Commissioner’s Office raided the offices of Ian Kerr, they began a domino effect that would end a 30-year conspiracy involving the UK’s biggest construction companies, the police and security services.
Ian Kerr’s company, The Consulting Association, kept indexes on thousands of construction workers – often union members or workers who had raised health and safety concerns. His database detailed their names, addresses, newspaper clippings and evaluations of their character such as “ex-shop steward, definite problem” and “Irish ex-army, bad egg”. Construction firms would check the names of potential employees with Kerr, who would check their details against his records of ‘troublemakers’. People on the database were prevented from work.
The Information Commissioner’s Office forced Kerr to shut down The Consulting Association and prosecuted him. We made details of the database available to people who were on it, which then supported legal action. In 2016, Unite, GMB and Ucatt settled with construction firms in a compensation package worth millions of pounds.