Miners' Strike (Pardons) (Scotland) Act 2022: pardon eligibility self-assessment guide - updated January 2025

Qualifying Criteria

7. To qualify for a pardon, you must be a qualifying individual and have committed a qualifying offence. These terms are explained below.

8. A qualifying individual is:

• A miner (this is defined in the Bill as meaning an individual employed at any time during the period of 12 March 1984 to 3 March 1985 by the National Coal Board or a small mine licensee regardless of the type of work they did); or
• A person who, at the time of committing a qualifying offence, lived in the same household as a miner (as defined above); or was a parent, sibling or child of a miner.

9. A qualifying offence is defined as:

• Breach of the peace;
• Breach of bail, which at the time of the strike was covered by section 3 of the Bail etc. (Scotland) Act 1980;
• An offence under section 41(1)(a) of the Police (Scotland) Act 1967, such as obstructing the police etc;
• An offence under section 7 of the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875 – this covers conduct aimed at compelling a person to do something, or compelling a person to abstain from doing something which the person had a legal right to do or not to do. Further information is provided at Annex C; and
• Theft.

10. The qualifying offence must have led to a conviction in a Scottish court. Convictions from courts elsewhere (such as in England or Wales) are not pardoned under the Act.

11. For all of the above qualifying offences (with the exception of theft), the offence must have occurred while a qualifying individual was

• Taking part in an activity supporting or opposing the miners’ strike; or
• Assembling before or after, or travelling to or from, an activity supporting or opposing the miners’ strike (this is sometimes called ancillary activity); or
• Reacting to behaviour which falls within either of the two descriptions above.

12. In the case of theft, the circumstances required in paragraph 11 are not relevant. The requirement for theft is that it must have been committed to relieve economic hardship arising from taking part in the miners’ strike – where the qualifying individual was either a participant in the strike, or was acting to relieve hardship caused by someone else participating in the strike.

13. Offences relating to matters which were not connected to the Miners’ strike are excluded from the pardon - for example, a qualifying person who was convicted for a breach of the peace which related to a personal dispute with another person (such as the boundary of garden ground between neighbouring properties) would not be pardoned for that offence.