Disclosure and Barring Service

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2016 Westminster Hall

[Jeff Smith]

I absolutely agree. The case is similar to that of Nazim in my constituency. Despite my office raising the issue both with the DBS and with the Government, he became unable to work because his licence expired, which understandably caused him and his family a huge amount of stress and some financial hardship.

The second case is of Angela Gallagher, a constituent of mine who lost a job as an occupational therapist because her DBS certificate was so delayed. She spoke to me about her constant phone calls to the DBS for updates only to be told to be patient and that the DBS was working through the backlog. She could not understand why, after she had been offered a job, the system was putting such obstacles in her way. She described how it affected her family’s finances—at the time, she was forced to sign on to out-of-work benefits—and how her mental health was affected by the stress caused by the delay and by her inability to access the job.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent point and an excellent speech. One of my constituents told me how, although she knew there was nothing in her background that could possibly come up, the stress of waiting made her worry that somebody had made something up about her that was going to come to light. Waiting for weeks and weeks for a resolution added to her mental ill health.

[Jeff Smith]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is an extremely stressful process for a person stuck in this limbo.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Sir David. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) on securing this important debate and on her excellent speech on behalf of her constituents. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith) for joining the debate and for again representing his constituents with such clarity and integrity.

As my own mailbag can attest, delays occurring in the Disclosure and Barring Service are making life exceptionally difficult for many workers in this country. Frankly, Minister, we need to sort that out. As we know, the DBS enables employers to make safer recruitment decisions by identifying candidates who may be unsuitable for certain types of job. The service plays a vital role in keeping our young people and vulnerable adults safe. Having access to DBS certificates is essential for people who want to pursue careers working with vulnerable people and groups, and for organisations such as hospitals and schools, which need to recruit staff.

One of my constituents, a qualified teacher working with children with special educational needs, informed me that her DBS check had been stuck with the Metropolitan Police Service for three months, despite the fact that it has a target of 18 days. Since her DBS expired in February, she has been offered a number of roles but has been unable to start work because of the delay. Without work, she is now in arrears with her rent, her car insurance and other monthly bills.

In May 2016, it was reported that 10% of the staff of one primary school in north London were unable to fulfil their roles because of the delays. The headteacher said:

“Under official guidelines you can do a risk assessment based on the DBS from someone’s previous job, but they have to be supervised at all times…In one case we had to wait four months for a check to come through. There’s already a teacher shortage in London so this is a headache we could do without.”

That is the real impact of the delays: schools with teacher shortages are unable to recruit staff, unemployed teachers are falling into debt and employees are left waiting anxiously for months. That is simply not good enough.

These delays cause real anxiety, as my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Withington attested. Employees are expecting to hear back within eight weeks, and as the weeks pass they become really anxious that the delays are the result of a complication with their check. The problem is made worse by the fact that application processing times seem to be entirely arbitrary. People in that situation understandably fear that their job offer will be withdrawn. I also know from my constituents that people from the same area who apply at the same time will sometimes get radically different response times.

[James Berry]

The hon. Lady will be probably aware that in some of these cases, the fact that an individual has moved a number of times and a number of different police forces have to be contacted can explain the longer delay, even if they have applied at the same time as another constituent. Six police forces having to do checks will involve a much longer process than just one.

[Lyn Brown]

I accept that point, but the hon. Gentleman must accept that that is a symptom of living in London. My constituents have not all lived in West Ham all their lives; they have travelled from all over the country, and yet they are still given an arbitrary response time. I would really like the Minister to explain whether there is a system for prioritising some checks over others—or does she have another explanation, as the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (James Berry) does, for the vastly differing response times that constituents experience?

The DBS states that it aims to deal with 95% of applications within eight weeks. It is currently at 93.8%, which is below that target but not far off. However, that figure masks what is actually a deep problem in some parts of the country: the severe delays that kick in when some police forces get involved in the process. As we know, there are five stages to a DBS check. The majority of delays occur at stage 4, when individual police forces check their records to make sure that the potential matches are not missed.

Police forces have targets to process 85% of applications within 14 days and 90% within 18 days. In July 2016, the Metropolitan Police Service hit its 14-day target just 14% of the time. Things do not get much better for its 18-day target, which it met just 19% of the time. In April 2016, the then Home Office Minister, the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), revealed in a written answer that the Metropolitan Police Service took on average 85 days to carry out stage 4 of the DBS process.

Let us recap: the whole process from stage 1 to stage 5 should take eight weeks. However, the Metropolitan Police Service is taking an average of 85 days to do its part of the process—that is just over 12 weeks. In those circumstances, it is literally impossible for the DBS to meet its eight-week target because one of the five stages is taking longer than the total target time. No wonder I, as a London MP, receive so many complaints about the service from my constituents.

Having researched the details, it is of little surprise to me that the Metropolitan Police Service is struggling. Just look at what has happened to its support staff, which have been cut by a third since the Conservatives came to power: down from 14,179 in 2010 to 9,521 in 2016. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood rightly said, those cuts have had consequences. Under the strain of falling staff numbers, a substantial backlog of applications has emerged. All police forces have a target of having no more than 12 days’ worth of work on DBS checks at any one time, meaning that if no new applications were received, police forces would be able to deal with all existing applications within 12 days. The most recent figures available show that it would take the Metropolitan Police Service 60 days to complete the pile of DBS applications it is sitting on, and only if no more came in. That is five times the target.

This is not only a London issue. In Nottinghamshire, the 14-day target for stage 4 of the process is currently being met just 7% of the time, while in North Yorkshire the target for both 14 and 18 days is being met just 12% of the time. In fact, according to the Government’s July 2016 red, amber or green assessment, 17 of the 50 forces were judged to be providing a second-rate service or worse. Something has to be done to improve the situation, and fast. We cannot have potential employees and potential employers waiting for so long. I want to know what the Government will do about it. It is unfair on both sides and it is causing financial damage.

This is not a new phenomenon. Research by the House of Commons Library revealed that the Met has not hit its 14-day target since February 2008. That is more than eight years for which my constituents, and other people living and working in London, have had to put up with a substandard service. For six of those years, the Minister’s party has been in government. A Government press release from earlier this month stated that they have been

“working very closely with the Met to help improve performance and good progress is being made to reduce applications in progress.”

If that is true, it is very welcome, but I am yet to see any evidence that good progress is being made. The most recent figures show a service struggling to keep up with demand, and people having to wait far longer than they should to have their applications processed.

Will the Minister inform the House of precisely what steps the Government have taken in the short term to help police forces to clear their backlogs? Will she also tell us how long she anticipates it will take for the service to return to an acceptable level? Some undefined time in the future is simply not good enough when people’s livelihoods and careers depend on their being able to get these checks carried out promptly.

The police missing their time targets is not the only problem. The DBS has failed to meet its accuracy targets in each of the last three months as well. I am told that the failures are administrative, such as spelling a name wrong or placing an inaccurate date of birth on the form, but that is not clear from the DBS business plan, which explains the performance indicators, because an inaccurate check is not defined. I am not told that it is administrative; I am not told that it is a small issue; and I am not reassured that inappropriate people are not getting DBS certificates, or that people who should be given certificates are not being refused. Will the Minister assure us today that the accuracy failures are largely administrative? Can she give us a figure for them, or a percentage? Can she give us any reassurance whatever? Will she prove to the House that inappropriate people have not been receiving DBS certificates to which they are not entitled?

I do not want to downplay the importance of administrative failures. They need to be rectified because they really do have knock-on effects. Take another of my constituents, who contacted me earlier this year about her DBS check. She informed me that after waiting six months for her application to be processed, her certificate, when it finally arrived, was inaccurately filled in, as it failed to include a previous name. As a result of delays and inaccurate information, my constituent was unable to take up employment as a childminder and has lost significant earnings. These are legal documents and they need to be filled in as accurately as possible so that people can use them.

Will the Minister inform the House of the steps the Government have taken to make sure that the accuracy of barring decisions improves in future? I really would like to be reassured that she takes this matter seriously. My hon. Friends the Members for Dulwich and West Norwood and for Manchester, Withington asked a number of pertinent questions in the course of their contributions. They asked for detail, and I hope the Minister will be able to provide it today, but, if not, will she commit to answering us in writing within the next week or so?

Let us face it: the longer delays to DBS checks are the result of cuts to our police services. The Metropolitan Police Service and other struggling police services are simply overburdened with the number of applications they are receiving. They do not have the resources they need. We know that since 2010 the Met has seen police support staff cut by 33%, and today we have heard about the reality of those cuts: poorer services and people missing out on jobs. That is, I am afraid, the Government’s record on the DBS.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Newton]

I completely understand that if there is job insecurity, that makes it difficult to retain good-quality staff. I visited the Metropolitan police unit only a few weeks ago and witnessed the training process. The decision-making process is complex, and it takes time to train staff. Even when the DBS sits down with the Met or any other police force that is having difficulty and agrees extra funding, it takes at least six months to train someone so that they can carry out the checks.

The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood is right that the PCS union has acknowledged that there has been a change of leadership at the Met. The Home Office has provided considerable support to help improve processes, and the DBS has funded more than 100 new staff, so there has been a huge amount of effort. The hon. Lady understands, as I do, that more of the staff have now been given full-time contracts. The DBS sits down with the police forces each year and agrees the contracts based on the anticipated number of checks. If the number of checks requested goes up, more staff have to be recruited. Sometimes it is efficient and right to have temporary staff; on other occasions we need more full-time staff. Such contractual decisions are made between the DBS and the police forces. I have also seen that no stone is left unturned. The Met has asked for support from other police forces that have a surplus of staff with the right expertise to help. So I can absolutely assure the hon. Lady that every effort has been made between the DBS and the police forces to get the necessary resources in.

Only two police forces are not meeting their timeliness performance targets: the Met and Surrey. In the case of Surrey, a relatively small number of people are affected and a recovery plan has been agreed with the DBS, which is going well. I can share that information and be certain about it because the DBS regularly publishes the data on its own website. That addresses one of the issues that the hon. Lady raised, about the transparency of data. Opposition Members have quoted extensively from performance data, so there is not an issue of transparency here. Those data are on local police force performance as well as the DBS’s own organisational performance, and the next data will be published later this month. I look at such data on a daily basis.

[Lyn Brown]

I am struggling with what the Minister is telling us. First, we know there has been a problem in the Met since 2008, which is a long time. We know that the delays in the Met are massive. If the DBS has been placing money in the Metropolitan Police Service so that it can get the checks done, then it must have been significantly underpaying the Met for several years in order for us to have got to the current situation. I am afraid I cannot accept what the Minister is saying about that.

The Minister also tells us that only two police forces are not meeting the timescales, but in the Government’s own assessment, on the red, amber and green scale, 17 of the 50 forces were judged to be providing a second-rate service or worse. It is not only two police forces; by the Government’s own admission, it is more.

[Sarah Newton]

The hon. Lady raises a couple of points. The data I am referring to are the most recent. We will get another tranche of data this month, so she will be able to see for herself what the information is.

On how the Metropolitan police or any other police force is funded, the fact is that the DBS funds police units to do police checks. Whether they have received adequate funding over a certain period of time is a fair question. I have been to Liverpool and had conversations with the DBS, and I am monitoring the situation on a weekly basis. I will go back to the DBS to make sure that all the recovery plans we have discussed are implemented. I can say no more to reassure the hon. Lady about how seriously I take this issue. I and my officials are focused on it, and I am regularly involved with the DBS to make sure we tackle it.

As I have said, I visited the Metropolitan police unit recently. The hon. Lady has acknowledged that significant extra resources and changes in leadership have been put in place, and the unit is processing 20% more applications than it receives. That gives me some confidence that it will reduce the backlog over time. If the unit was processing only the number of applications that it was receiving, we would not have any confidence that it was dealing with the backlog, but it is, and 20% is significant. I am therefore confident that it will make significant progress.

It is important that the DBS continues to work closely with the Metropolitan police and any other police forces that are having difficulties to make sure that they are given the necessary resources to do the job. I know that the Metropolitan police take the matter seriously. I have been to Sidcup and spent time with the team there, and they talked me through what they were doing about it. They know full well that I will be back again to personally check up on their progress.

I will go through the range of other questions that hon. Members asked me on issues from portability to escalation and redress.