You will not get a licence unless your sentence restrictions for a conviction, caution or warning have ended for at least two years before your licence application, or for at least five years before you licence application where we consider the offence to be serious. Serious offences include those involving violence, weapons, drugs, serious criminal damage, theft and dishonesty.

We will pay special attention to offences involving violence, weapons, drugs, criminal damage and sexual offences.

We also consider the effects of rehabilitation on assessing your eligibility for a licence, and in some circumstances, will treat cautions and warnings on record more leniently than convictions.

Where we judge it necessary to refuse your licence we will write to you to inform you of our decision.

Charges awaiting trial

If, when we process your application, there are outstanding charges against you for relevant offences, we will wait until the courts have determined the outcome of the charges before making a decision.

Ex-juvenile offenders

If offences which you committed as a juvenile remain on record then we will take them into account as we do any other offence. We will see how relevant, how serious and how recent they were, but we will also consider your age at the time of the offence.

We will not consider criminal records gained between the ages of ten and twelve unless they relate to extremely serious offences as described in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. We will, however, look at any serious offences committed between the ages of twelve and fifteen and all relevant offences if committed when you were sixteen or seventeen.

More information on the SIA's criminality criteria > >

I have no convictions > >