In 2016 the DBS checking service was massively overloaded leading to huge waiting times and meaning that teachers, nurses etc couldn’t start work.
www.theguardian.com/money/2016/may/22/bureaucratic-backlog-nurses-carers-teachers-cannot-work-disclosure-barring-service
Apparently, the solution the Metropolitan police reached was to stop doing the checks properly to speed up the process - which is what they did for the last six months of 2016. They stopped checking candidates against intelligence databases and only checked them against police databases.
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/20-000-slip-through-child-security-police-vetting-qfd6c2vpl
No one was told the vetting had been relaxed. People pay for these checks and make hiring decisions based on them.
Bloody hell. Shouldn’t the affected checks be redone for free?