To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, pursuant to the Answer of 6 January 2015 to Question 216757, on vetting, what the average time to process applications has been in each month since January 2014; and what the cost of bringing in additional personnel to help deal with the high volume of applications has been.

The tables below give the average number of days taken to complete: Security Clearance (SC) and Counter-terrorist checks (CTC) - Table 1; and Developed vetting (DV) - Table 2, for both the Ministry of Defence and Other Government Departments. Each table gives performance against both routine cases and those specifically identified by the customer as requiring priority treatment. The tables show both the gross period of time taken, i.e. the time between initiating and completing the clearance and, within this, the net period, measuring the average number of days for which the case was being actively managed by Defence Business Services (DBS). The latter discounts periods when DBS is awaiting inputs from third party suppliers, and is the basis on which performance targets are set for DBS.

The performance target for SC and CTC cases is to process 85% of routine cases within 25 days (net), and 95% of priority cases within 10 days (net).

The performance target for DV cases is to process 85% of routine cases within 95 days, and 95% of priority cases within 30 days.

An additional £1.2 million has been spent on personnel costs by DBS to help manage the higher demand to reduce the impact on customers and the introduction of new services.