CRB pledges to "speed up vetting"

With its new Disclosure service up-and running as of this month, the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) will take over most of the work carried out by the police when it comes to official criminal records checking. According to Keith Broadbent, the CRB's operations director, the new service "will help many more employers and voluntary organisations make informed recruitment decisions."

For in-house security managers and contract guarding companies, Disclosure should speed up the process of vetting new security officers. As things stand, the CRB has pledged to provide a Basic Disclosure (see 'Full screen ahead', SMT, March 2002, pp36-38) on a job applicant's criminal record within one week.

Mike Bluestone – managing director of security consultancy the Berkeley Security Bureau, and a member of the Fraud Advisory Panel – believes that quicker checks will enable employers to weed out job applicants with criminal convictions before (rather than subsequent to) their employment.

Bluestone told SMT: "This breakthrough is essential for the industry. Under the old system a criminal record check could take three to six weeks. Now, it's going to happen in a matter of days."

Faster checks will also help the security industry compete with other industries for labour. That's certainly the view of Ian Whitmore, director of security recruitment agency C2C.

"In those areas where there is low unemployment, manned guarding companies often lose out to supermarket and warehouse chains when trying to recruit new officers," said Whitmore. "It often takes a guarding contractor weeks to run a criminal record check on a job applicant who could go for a warehouse job, fill in an application form today and start tomorrow. If Disclosure serves to speed up the vetting process as it should, that problem will not exist any more."

Levels of Disclosure
Despite all of these positive noises, there is tangible disappointment within the security industry that employers will only be able to request a Basic Disclosure from the CRB on job applicants which only shows unspent criminal convictions. In general, the CRB will only make Standard and Enhanced Disclosures (which include spent convictions, as well as details of any cautions, reprimands or warnings) available to employers recruiting staff who are likely to work with children and/or vulnerable adults.

The higher level Disclosures will be issued in respect of certain statutory licensing requirements. This means that, once the Private Security Industry Act 2001 is fully implemented, contract security staff will then undergo a full criminal records check in order to obtain a licence. However, as the Act only covers contract security staff, employers will not be able to check if in-house officers do in fact possess any unspent convictions.

There’s still a huge gulf when it comes to vetting, mainly because in-house staff are not yet captured by the terms of the Act. Employers will not have any recourse with the CRB for checking these people out

Chris Smith – head of corporate security at Deutsche Bank AG, London

Chris Smith, head of corporate security at Deutsche Bank AG (London), told SMT: "There's still a huge gulf when it comes to vetting, mainly because in-house staff are not yet captured by the terms of the Act. As employers, we will not have any recourse with the CRB for checking these people out in the proper way."

Undaunted, Bill Wyllie – chairman of ASIS (UK) and head of security at the Bank of England – welcomes the Disclosure moves, and very much hopes that it means employers can now access a job applicant's criminal records. "The new criminal records checks make it a whole new ball game for checking, and not before time," opined Wyllie. "In the past, it wasn't always easy to access criminal records information."

Keith Francis, sales and marketing director at manned security provider VSG, hopes that the CRB's service will bring a certain uniformity to staff vetting. Francis stated: "We have come across a number of police forces that are reluctant to keep on providing information with respect to criminal records simply because of the administration involved."

In practice, employers will not be able to obtain details of job applicants' criminal records direct from the CRB. Applicants themselves will have to request a Disclosure, and then show the forms to their employer.

"If the job applicant takes his or her form to the CRB and then doesn't return to their potential employer about the job, the employer will know that that applicant probably has something to hide," added Mike Bluestone.

The costs of Disclosure
Before an organisation requests a Disclosure from prospective or existing employees that firm must register with the Bureau itself. This involves a one-off payment of £300. The fee for each subsequent Disclosure is £12. At present, applications for Disclosures have to be made over the telephone, but the CRB is preparing to go online at some point in the future.