Criminal check blunders cost £10k a month
OFFICIALS tasked with criminal records checks following the Soham murders have been paying out almost £10,000 a month to frustrated jobseekers in compensation for delays or blunders.
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During the last four years £477,000 has been paid to people whose criminal clearance has been botched by the government agency responsible for doing the checks.
One jobseeker received a payout of £7,248 after officials at the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) admitted their application had been delayed by more than four years.
The number of complaints to the DBS had risen from 2,283 three years ago to 6,639 last year.
The data released by the agency following a Freedom of Information Act request showed one applicant was paid £17,700 after delays stopped them from taking up a position for almost three months.
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These blunders are due to the bloated bureaucratic vetting system
Blunders can be due to staff or public bodies issuing wrong addresses or saying the person had a criminal past.
It can mean people are wrongly branded paedophiles, violent offenders, fraudsters, thieves or drug addicts when applying for jobs with children or vulnerable adults.
Those wrongly accused are forced to go through an appeals process.
Compensation is often linked to the salary of the job.
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DBS checks began after the 2002 murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman by school caretaker Ian Huntley in Soham, Cambridgeshire.
Josie Appleton of the Manifesto Club, which campaigns against excessive rules, said: “These blunders are due to the bloated bureaucratic vetting system.”
The DBS said it issued 4.2 million disclosure certificates a year and the error rate was 0.01 per cent. Turnaround time was 12 days.
“We aim for accuracy in every check we make,” it added.