Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 18 September 2015 to Question 8917, what recent assessment she has made of the performance of the Disclosure and Barring service; and what the average processing time is for disclosure applications.

The average processing time for disclosure applications was 15.3 days in December 2015, the latest month for which figures are available. The DBS operates to a target to issue 95% of disclosure certificates within 56 days (8 weeks) and 94.3% were issued within this target in December 2015.

DBS is working closely with those forces who performance does not meet turnaround time targets.