News

• Cost of criminal checks rises again
• Criminal checks for home care workers introduced

Criminal Records Bureau managing director John O’Brien has defended the decision to more than double the charge for carrying out security checks on social care staff from July, writes Derren Hayes.

O’Brien told Community Care that increasing the costs of processing enhanced police checks from £13 to £29 would enable the CRB to balance its books in the long term.

“We said at the start of the CRB that it would be self-funding, but after a year’s operation the current charge is not the operational cost,” he added.

The price of standard disclosures will also rise to £24.

The Department of Health, the Department for Education and Skills and the Home Office will also provide £19 million of funding for 2003-4. O’Brien said this reflects a contribution towards the cost of carrying out the checks on staff employed in the NHS, schools and who work as volunteers.

The price hikes come as the CRB’s annual report shows that it processed just over half of all enhanced disclosures within the three-week target set by the government, and only one in five standard checks within the one-week target.

Consequentially, the CRB has watered down this year’s performance targets so that it aims to process 90 per cent of enhanced disclosures within four weeks, and 90 per cent of standard ones within two weeks.

O’Brien said the CRB’s poor performance and the subsequent delays in processing checks  - 9,000 long term checks are still outstanding - were partly due to the higher than expected demand for enhanced disclosures – 85 per cent of its work is taken up with these checks.

“There was no other central checking service of this type in Europe, so it had to be built from scratch and estimates were based on the latest market research at the time,” he said.

O’Brien added that the CRB was looking at refining the service further, but refused to rule out future price increases for checks to pay for improvements.