Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate he has made of the number of occasions on which referrals to the Disclosure and Barring Service have been set aside for over (a) one, (b) six, and (c) nine months.

Referrals to the Disclosure and Barring Service are not set aside as their operating procedures do not allow for this. Barring cases are triaged and reviewed upon receipt and allocated in line with workflow processes.

Under DBS’ published service standards their aim is to close more than 65% of barring cases within three months. Performance data on attainment of this standard in 2017-2018 can be found here https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dbs-annual-report-and-accounts-2017-to-2018.

DBS also publishes quarterly performance data on barring cases and appeals against barring decisions relating to revised internal performance standards here https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/dbs-dataset-4-barring-cases-and-appeals.