Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to reduce the processing time for Disclosure and Barring Service checks for people working in the health and social care sector.

The Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) is operationally independent from the Home Office and operates to service standards of completing 85% of Basic check applications within 2 days, 85% of Standard check applications within 3 days, and 80% of Enhanced check applications within 14 days.

The DBS year to date performance against these targets up to November 2024 is 87.9% for Basic checks, 90.2% for Standard checks, and 75.7% for Enhanced checks. These attainments apply to applications across all employment sectors, including the health and social care sectors.

Specific support to the health and social care sectors is provided by the DBS Partnerships Team who have held recent meetings with NHS England, NHS Employers, Skills for Care, Care Quality Commission and Home Care Association, as well as on a regional level with local NHS, local authorities and care providers, about how checks are processed and how to improve the quality of applications submitted to the DBS in order to reduce processing times.

The DBS also provides the ‘adult first’ service to employing organisations in the care sector. Under this service, organisations can request a check of the DBS adults’ barred list and, depending on the result, a person can be permitted to start work, under supervision, with vulnerable adults before the result of an Enhanced DBS check.