About us

Who we are:

The Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) helps employers make safer recruitment and employment decisions. DBS is a non-departmental public body (NDPB) accountable to Parliament through the Secretary of State for the Home Office.

We contribute to the Home Office’s objective of reducing crime and the delivery of the Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls strategy, as well as its wider fundamental role in the security and economic prosperity of the UK.

DBS was established in 2012, under the provisions of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, when the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) and the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) merged. The creation of DBS made for a more convenient and proportionate system for employers and volunteer organisations, and the people seeking to work or volunteer with vulnerable groups, including children.

What we do:

DBS’ purpose as an organisation is to protect the public by helping employers make safer recruitment and employment decisions, and by barring individuals who pose a risk to vulnerable people.

DBS does this by processing DBS checks, issuing DBS certificates, and making decisions about whether individuals should be barred from working with vulnerable groups, including children.

DBS processes DBS checks for England, Wales, Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man, issuing 4 types of certificates, and we maintain the Children’s and Adults’ Barred Lists for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Our available types of certificates will show certain criminal records or other relevant information held by the police, dependent on the level of check. The levels are: Basic, Standard, Enhanced, and Enhanced with Barred List(s).

We also work to raise awareness and educate our partners, stakeholders, and the public, to ensure checks are being carried out on the right people at the right time, so we can more effectively protect the public.

Our support work

The work of our support teams is crucial in increasing understanding of vital topics such as who needs to be referred for barring consideration, how to make a good quality barring referral, and what level of DBS check should be applied for by new recruits or those in existing roles. In the year 2022-23, the barring quality rate of closure was 99.86%, indicating that our work in this area is making a difference.

We have seen an increase of over 40% in barring referrals over the last 5 years, and our work to increase awareness among employers about the type of check needed coincided with a period when DBS check applications increased, from 5.9 million per year 5 years ago, to 7.1 million presently.

Our recent achievements

  • DBS Customer Services team resolved 99.8% of complaints received within 6 days, exceeding the set delivery targets
  • DBS Sensitive Application team won the ‘Inclusivity Award’ at the Operational Delivery Profession national awards
  • DBS Regional Outreach team delivered workshops to over 10,000 attendees
  • DBS received approximately 15,000 barring cases, with 14,845 being closed
  • DBS had a 59% reduction of overall carbon emissions from estate and business travel against baseline
  • The average time to issue a Standard DBS certificate in 2022-23 was 1.6 calendar days
  • In the same year, 94.7% of Standard DBS certificates were issued within 5 calendar days
  • 78.4% of Enhanced DBS certificates were issued within 14 calendar days
  • DBS processed 54,432 Enhanced checks in support of the Homes for Ukraine scheme
  • 98.1% of Automatic Barring cases were completed within 6 months

Our technology:

DBS’ objective within the technology space is to drive efficiencies and value for money while fostering a culture of innovation through a modern, stable, secure, and accessible technology estate.

To achieve this goal, DBS has been working hard on kickstarting our legacy technology estate replacement programme, which will invest in modernising our technology and decommissioning existing solutions (currently R0 for disclosure products and R1 within the barring service). In addition, we have continued to develop our current technology products and services through our digital modernisation programme.

These projects will allow us to provide fit-for-purpose technology to both customers and staff, not only providing significant efficiency savings, whilst remediating the existing risks we carry as a business around failing technology – and the impact this could have on our safeguarding responsibilities.

We are already seeing significant time savings for customers, and quality improvements through our recent digital services (Basic Digital Service and Barring Referral Service), however this continued investment in modern and suitable technology, will mean we can provide colleagues with the tools to complete their work more quickly and make decisions faster, we can offer our customers a more efficient service, that can be more accessible by design.

We will be introducing automation into our processes, providing significant time, cost and resourcing savings, meaning that colleagues will be able to remove repetitive tasks from their workloads and focus on the more complex activities and decision-making responsibilities – producing quicker results and decisions for customers, and speeding up their time into employment.

DBS has been working closely with Home Office on a digital identity project, GOV.UK One Login, which allows customers to verify their identity online, in a much simpler, quicker, and more accessible way than the previous system. Already, this is yielding much better results than the previous system, with easier navigation and a higher success rate of identity checks. We believe having a system that meets user needs, therefore allowing citizens to easily access public services online, in turn increases public trust and confidence in DBS as an organisation. DBS as an organisation wants to be digital by default, and projects like this contribute to this ambition.

Throughout all these activities we will be looking to learn from our past experiences and approaching digital developments in a different way. For example, we will be including more colleagues, especially those who are subject matter experts, both earlier in and throughout the process to ensure solutions are fit-for-purpose and introducing cloud-based applications – allowing us to constantly evolve our technology estate. This provides us with a better use of public funds, and ultimately enables us to continue to protect the public through enabling employers to make safer recruitment and employment decisions.

We’re committed over the next 12 months to delivering new citizen-facing products for customers and partners, as well as providing our people with new tools so they’re better supported in their work and introduce new capabilities to be a more efficient organisation.