§ Mr. GerrardTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what the backlog of the vetting of teachers by the Criminal Records Bureau is; and what the average time has been for a case to be dealt with by the Bureau. [89339]
§ Hilary BennThe information is not available in the form requested as there are no Information Technology (IT) procedures at present to extract this data from Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) database. It is expected that this capacity will become available in subsequent system releases.
Since 11 March 2002 the Criminal Records Bureau has received 1,164,784 Disclosure applications and has issued over 938,981 Disclosures. Over the last six full weeks before Christmas the CRB has been averaging around 45,000 Disclosures per week, which is over double the weekly output issued by the police under the previous arrangements. Many of the total number of applications outstanding, currently 225,803, were returned to applicants to provide missing information.
On average Disclosure applications are taking five weeks to complete.