Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what discussions she has had with the Disclosure and Barring Service over the time taken to process an enhanced check; and what assessment she has made of the adequacy of resources available to the Disclosure and Barring Service.

As the Minister for Safeguarding, I meet with the Chairman of the Disclosure and Barring Service to discuss performance.

The Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) has a service standard to issue 80% of Enhanced checks within 14 days. Its performance remains consistently strong against this service standard as can be seen for the 2022-23 reporting year and first quarter of 2023-24 DBS dataset 1: DBS checks, the DBS Update Service, and disputes - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).

To summarise performance, the attainment over the 2022/23 reporting year was 78.4%, with over 3.5 million customers receiving their Enhanced DBS check results within 14 days. The average turnaround time over the past year was 10.7 days, and 80% of all enhanced Disclosures were issued by day 16 against the 14-day target.