Vetting
Home Department
Written answers and statements, 5 November 2009
Christopher Huhne (Eastleigh, Liberal Democrat)
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many and what percentage of (a) standard checks and (b) enhanced checks undertaken by the Criminal Records Bureau were the subject of a dispute by (i) the applicant and (ii) an employer in each year since 1997.
Alan Johnson (Home Secretary; Kingston upon Hull West & Hessle, Labour)
holding answer
The table details the number checks undertaken by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) which were the subject of a dispute since the launch of the disclosure service in 2002.
Information is not held to enable a breakdown of the number or percentage of disputes that relate to either the applicant or the employer.
| Disclosure type | |||
| Total number of disputes | Total number of disclosures issued | Percentage of disputes | |
| 2002-03 | 1,111 | 1,437,094 | 0.077 |
| 2003-04 | 1,887 | 2,284,688 | 0.082 |
| 2004-05 | 2,291 | 2,430,937 | 0.094 |
| 2005-06 | 2,379 | 2,770,265 | 0.085 |
| 2006-07 | 2,112 | 3,277,957 | 0.064 |
| 2007-08 | 2,288 | 3,323,251 | 0.068 |
| 2008-09 | 2,509 | 3,855,881 | 0.065 |
| 2009-10 | 743 | 1,747,710 | 0.042 |
The contents of a disclosure can be disputed for a number of reasons, such as:
The record relates to someone with the same details as the applicant and based on the information available the CRB was unable to dissociate the applicant from the record.
Where locally held information is released the applicant feels it is either inaccurate, misleading or is otherwise inaccurate in the opinion of the applicant and as a result the police agree to amend the information.
Where someone has had their identity stolen or cloned.
CRB quality assurance procedures are targeted at eliminating errors. In 2008-09, the accuracy rate for CRB Disclosures was 99.96 per cent.