Some changes to the SOR notification rules have been proposed for the new criminal justice bill. The restrictions on SO changing their names has made the headlines, but there are other changes too, in response to the Creedon report.

The new clauses make the following changes:

1. Require RSOs to notify police in advance where they will be absent from their notified home address
for five or more days.

2. Create a new requirement to provide advance notification of contact with children for those RSOs
who have convictions of sexual offences against a child, and RSOs without child sex offence
convictions where police have intelligence suggesting they may pose a risk to children.

3. Give the police the power to receive notification from RSOs virtually in specified circumstances,
removing the need for an RSO to be physically present at a police station.

4. Provide the police the power to review and discharge those RSOs who – due to the severity of their
original sentence – are indefinitely subject to the notification requirements. If the police are satisfied
the offender is low risk, this change would allow the police to discharge the offender from their
notification requirements without the RSO having to apply first.

5. Lower the authorising rank from superintendent to inspector for section 96B warrant applications,
which allows the police to conduct a home visit on RSOs.

and then there is the name change ban, which allows police to stop someone from changing their name and requires 7 days notice of a name change, not three days.

Number 4 is probably the most significant, because it appears to get rid of the 15 year fixed limit, before someone can be removed from the register. What it does not say is what the minimum period is, before someone can be removed, but potentially, it could see a lot of people taken off the SOR.

But number 2 is perhaps the most restrictive and again requires more detail. It doesn't say what 'contact' means, which is arguably a good opportunity to put that into law, because at the moment, the meaning of the word 'contact' in SHPOs is also unclear.

But lets assume it only means going to a house where a child lives and not any contact with a child anywhere at all, because that would be unworkable. It still creates an almost impossible situation, because how does the person know that the child is going to be there in advance? The current rules require you to notify the police after being in a house with a child for more than 12 hours. The new rules require you to guess where a child is going to be, so what if you get it wrong? Say you arrive at a friends house and there is a child there, that you weren't expecting. Are you now in breach, because you didn't inform the police in advance? That would be crazy. So the only way the law could work, is if you can correctly predict that there will be a child at a particular house, at a particular time. But of course, peoples plans change, so you might be wrong and you have then informed the police for nothing. But at least you can now inform them virtually without going to a police station, so that is something.