Police Force Delays
Your DBS check may be delayed if it has to go to the Metropolitan (Met) police.Enhanced DBS checks have to be reviewed by local police forces as part of the disclosure service. This is built-in to the time it usually takes to process your check.
The Met are resolving a number of issues with their staffing levels, and their relocation from New Scotland Yard. They tell us that this is compounded by an increase in the number of applications within the London area, which is causing delays in processing times.
Currently, some applications going to the Met are taking much longer than our 60 day escalation target. For some applications it can take up to 130 days before applications are processed. We know you will be concerned by this and understand the impact this can have on applicants and employers. We are working very closely with the Met to help them improve performance and they tell us that they will put this right as quickly as possible. But, the level of applications in progress means it will take them some time to resolve the issue.
The Met has a recovery plan in place which includes recruiting more staff, prioritising certain cases and escalating very urgent work where possible.
If you have an application in progress with the Met, and it reaches 60 days with the force, you can:
- Escalate your application using online tracking
- Email us at HR_transactional@Hounslow.gov.uk and we’ll contact the police to ask that your application is prioritised
Even at this stage, it should be noted, that it will be very difficult for the Met to escalate cases further because of the numbers they are currently dealing with.
Working to the recovery plan is our top priority. We are told by the Met that the impact of this issue will begin to decrease in December as the Met recruit, train and embed new processing staff into their disclosure unit.
We and the Met police apologise for this delay and will work tirelessly together to improve processing times for DBS checks as quickly as possible.