Corporate report

DBS 2020-25 strategy

Updated 7 June 2023

This is the five-year strategy of the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), detailing our ambitions for the next five years.

Our Purpose

Protecting the public by helping employers make safer recruitment decisions and by barring individuals who pose a risk to vulnerable groups from working and volunteering in certain roles.

Our Vision

Making Recruitment Safer, by being a visible, trusted and influential organisation, providing an outstanding quality of service to all our customers and partners, where our people understand the important safeguarding contributions they make and feel proud to work here.

Chairman’s foreword

The DBS board began the process of producing this five-year strategy during the summer of 2019. It was important to us that the strategy would be ambitious and focused on quality and people. Through the delivery of this strategy, DBS will ensure that the organisation continues to develop and thrive, provide services of the highest standards, and thereby make a real contribution to the national safeguarding arena.

At the outset, the DBS board took a major decision in deciding that we would co-create this strategy with our staff and partners, embarking on a wide-ranging set of both online and face-to-face ‘Big Conversations’ that resulted in over 40,000 contributions to the strategy. As a result, we have a strategy that reflects a very strong consensus, in terms of our purpose, vision, values, and priorities. This is a considerable achievement and one of which we are rightly proud.

To ensure we deliver on our commitments we have also introduced new governance arrangements that will equip us to lead the implementation of the strategy through to 2025. Quality is at the heart of this strategy. Everything we do over the next five years will contribute to playing our role in ensuring that, through our products and services, employers have the necessary information to make safe recruitment decisions. Our role now is to make sure that we deliver the strategy and we will work tirelessly to ensure that we do.

Chief Executive’s introduction

DBS is a national organisation undertaking a unique role. We issued 6 million certificates last year and maintain two Barred Lists of over 77,000 people. We employ over 1,000 staff to deliver these services. Our work provides significant protection to the public. Quality must be at the core of what we do; quality in the products we supply and quality in the decisions that we make. Our strategic plan will further improve an already well performing organisation. It will modernise the services we provide, the way we work and the way we interact with our partners.

The strategy contains a number of practical actions that will enable DBS to make tangible improvements to our service to the public. We will improve the way our services are accessed, the speed and efficiency of our processes, and use technology to enhance our work. We cannot deliver this plan on our own and we will work closely with our partners, both strategically and operationally, to make recruitment safer. We will also create the conditions to improve our performance, through smarter working, better staff development and a more inclusive and diverse workforce.

This strategy has been written at a point in time. It outlines the direction of travel and the key priority areas we will focus on. Each year it will be refreshed through the production of an annual business plan which will describe how we will take the actions that deliver our strategy for that year. I will focus my efforts to ensure we deliver this over the next five years on behalf of the board, our workforce and the public.

Our Strategic Priorities

Quality

• Provide high quality, reliable, consistent, timely and accessible services for our customers
• Embrace technology to drive improvements to the quality of our work

People

• Develop a talented and diverse workforce that understands how their contributions help to achieve our objectives
• Build a flexible, vibrant and contemporary workplace where our staff will be able to do their jobs using modern ways of working that are smart and which promote OneDBS

Profile

• Raise awareness of DBS and the services we offer, keeping people informed through our communications, to increase public understanding and confidence in our organisation
• Be a respected and trusted organisation, working with our partners to play an influential role in the environment in which we operate

Our values and behaviours

We work together

We collaborate, and we actively listen, learn, and share information with our colleagues throughout DBS and with our external partners.

We respect and value everyone, and we recognise and appreciate each other’s efforts.

We are transparent, and we communicate clearly, openly, and with transparency in all of our interactions at work.

We act with integrity

We are accountable, we take responsibility for our actions and decisions, and we follow through on our promises. We make sure that we treat all of our colleagues fairly.

We behave with professionalism, seeking to do the right thing.

We are customer-focused. We put the needs of our customers first in all of our actions at work, making sure that we deliver the best possible service for them.

We pursue excellence

We challenge ourselves to be creative and explore new ways of working so that we can provide the best possible service to our customers.

We always seek to produce our best quality work, consistently and accurately.

Purpose of this document

The purpose of this strategy is to set out the direction for DBS, identifying planned activity to improve the effectiveness of the organisation and our contribution to Making Recruitment Safer. Each year we will produce a more detailed business plan, focusing on the activities planned.

The strategy is aimed at our partners, our customers, and our people, so that everyone has a clear understanding of our route of travel and the changes we plan to make.

Our context

DBS is an established organisation with a clear role and remit, and long-standing ways of working. The world around us is changing rapidly and we must now respond to this context and in addition, sharpen our processes for horizon scanning and gaining insight, to ensure we embark on a continuous journey of improvement over the next five years.

DBS has a lower national profile than our role requires us to have. This ranges from a lack of awareness among employers of their duty to refer certain cases to Barring, eligibility for DBS check certificates and a low strategic profile with key stakeholders. It is important to rectify this to ensure we capture all relevant referrals. Technology continues to evolve, and the public now want to access services digitally and hold information on their smartphones and tablets. DBS technology is dated, our services are hard to access electronically, and our DBS certificates are still produced on paper.

While we are continually improving our use of technology this must now be accelerated. Many public and private organisations operate smarter working arrangements resulting in retaining staff and attracting new talent to their workforce. Research also shows that such arrangements result in an increase in productivity. DBS is quite traditional in its current approach and must address this.

Whilst there are contextual issues that are known, some are not, for example, what the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse may recommend, how government policy may change or what new technology could become available. However, we have attempted to futureproof the strategy by concentrating on delivering significant improvements to the quality of our work. Our annual review and annual business plans will allow us to be able to adapt to any significant changes in our operating environment.

Who we are and what we do

DBS delivers disclosure and barring functions on behalf of government. This includes DBS checks for England, Wales, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man and Barring functions for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. We carry out this work from bases in Darlington and Liverpool. DBS was created in 2012 under the provisions of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012.

We are a non-departmental public body (NDPB) accountable to Parliament through the Secretary of State for the Home Office. We provide an important service helping to safeguard and protect people in our society while ensuring proportionality and protecting the rights of individuals. We do this by providing relevant information, and where necessary, making barring decisions to help employers make safer recruitment decisions.

DBS issues four levels of certificates of criminal records, known as DBS checks, and we operate a system of updating certificates through our Update Service. We also bar individuals from working in certain circumstances. Our work is funded by the fees from our DBS check customers.

Basic DBS check

This is available for any position or purpose and will contain details of convictions and conditional cautions that are considered to be unspent.

Standard DBS check

Standard certificates are available for specific roles outlined in legislation. They show unspent and spent convictions, cautions, reprimands and warnings held on the Police National Computer, subject to filtering rules.

Enhanced DBS check

This is the highest level of check available to anyone involved in work with vulnerable groups, and other positions involving a high degree of trust. Enhanced certificates contain the same information as the Standard certificate, with the addition of relevant local police force information.

Enhanced with Barred Lists DBS check

An Enhanced with Barred Lists DBS check, shows the same as an Enhanced check plus whether the applicant is on the lists of those barred from working with children or vulnerable groups, where the role is in regulated activity. We make informed decisions about whether an individual should be barred from engaging in regulated activity with children and/or adults, and maintain the Children’s and Adults’ Barred Lists. We make informed decisions as to whether it is appropriate to remove a person from a Barred List.

Strategic Priority: Quality, Objective One

We will provide high quality, reliable, consistent, timely and accessible services for our customers.

Why is it important?

Quality is at the heart of everything we do. Our partners and customers want us to improve our delivery so they can rely upon a fast and accurate service. In order to fully meet the needs of our customers we need to make accessing the DBS easier and keep them informed. Our staff have said they are keen to understand what it is our customers need and want so they can help to improve all of our products.

How will we do it?

1. Develop a new vision for our customer journey for all services

We will understand who our customers are and the journey they go on in accessing our products. This will allow us to develop a plan to improve the quality of our service and modernise the way those services are provided. This will include significant product development and improved access through assistive technology, Easyread, and for people where English is not their first language.

2. Implement legislative change

We will carry out the necessary IT and process changes to be compliant with any revised legislation.

3. Introduce barring and safeguarding Improvements

We will continue to develop and enhance our barring service ensuring our robust and timely decisions are made accurately. We will deliver changes to improve the way Barring is organised, its profile, our relationship with our partners, the way the service is accessed, and the processes for dealing with all cases.

4. Develop our insight and intelligence

We will consolidate all our data within our new data warehouse, bringing together all of our business, management and performance information into one place. This will enable us to develop insight and intelligence to identify trends, advance our research programme and help the DBS continuously improve.

5. Introduce a new barring portal

We will redesign the barring portal making it more user-friendly for our customers to access, ensuring we receive good quality barring referrals and a reduction in the volume of paper referrals.

6. Introduce a new approach to marketing DBS

We will produce a marketing plan for DBS to enable us to better promote and develop our products.

7. We will enhance representation of relevant groups in the changes to our work. We will reduce the language barriers to our service particularly for those where English is not their first language.

We will know we have succeeded when:

• we have developed a new operating model for the services we provide and have delivered this over five years
• legislative change is embedded into what we do
• improvements in performance for all our services are tangible and sustainable, our complaints and appeals are reduced, and our performance metrics have improved
• our insight and intelligence are being used to help us improve our service delivery
• quality metrics have improved, and error rate decreased

Strategic Priority: Quality, Objective Two

We will embrace technology to drive improvements to the quality of our work.

Why is it important?

Our customers want easy access to services using mobile technology. Our current IT will not meet this need and we will need to improve our technology to enable us to speed up our processes and be able to adapt quickly in the future. Our people want us to embrace modern technology and ensure they have the right tools to provide excellent services. Our current systems require significant modernisation and there is a heavy reliance on paper rather than digital products.