Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what his Department's standard completion timetable is for processing DBS applications; how many applications his Department are processing and how many applications have been processed outside the standard timetable in the last 12 months.

For the 2023/24 financial year, the Disclosure and Barring Service’s (DBS) targets are to complete 85% of Basic checks within two days, 85% of Standard checks within three days, and 80% of Enhanced checks within 14 days.

DBS publishes its performance against these targets on a quarterly basis at DBS dataset 1: DBS checks, the DBS Update Service, and disputes - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). This includes the total monthly volumes of applications processed and the totals issued within target. The latest published information is up to December 2023.

In addition to this data, DBS’s performance for January and February 2024 is as follows:

• Basic checks – 435,350 checks processed of which 382,412 completed within the two-day target, exceeding the 85% target.
• Standard checks – 70,729 checks processed, of which 62,898 completed within the three-day target, exceeding the 85% target.
• Enhanced checks – 691,244 checks processed, of which 544,082 completed within the 14-day target, achieving 78.7% against the 80% target.