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• Auditors say CRB has improved but still has problems
• Cost of criminal checks rises again

The cost of vetting applications by the Criminal Records Bureau has risen by £150 million, it has been revealed in an evidence session of the House of Commons public accounts committee, writes Natasha Salari.

Capita, the firm responsible for running the Criminal Records Bureau on behalf of the Home Office, originally submitted a bid of just under £250 million for the 10-year contract. Other bids came in at £100 million more than Capita’s, including one from Pricewaterhouse Coopers for £380 million.

But Capita under-estimated the number of people who would use postal applications and the system crashed. The company thought that 85 per cent of applications would be made via a call centre and that just 15 per cent would be paper based.

At an evidence session of the public accounts committee, Vince Gaskell,  the chief executive of the CRB, revealed that the actual cost of the project will be £400 million.

A spokesperson for the Home Office said that the value of the contract had always been £400 million, and that the increase was due to the systems that needed to be in place to cope with the volume of paper applications.