Paul Burstow, a Liberal Democrat MP who is an NSPCC ambassador in the House of Commons, said the 400 wrong Disclosures were 'just yet another example of how the CRB has been badly implemented, badly planned and delivered far below what it was expected to deliver', and added, 'I feel it is letting its customers down.'
Mr Burstow also expressed concern about the commercial confidentiality surrounding details of the contracts for running the service. The CRB, which came into operation exactly a year ago, is run by Capita, the privately-owned facilities management company, which was awarded a 10-year contract in 2000. Mr Burstow said commercial confidentiality made it 'very hard to pinpoint where the underlying mistakes were made'.
He pointed out that the 2001 Home Affairs Select Committee report on the setting up of the CRB had said 'it would be unacceptable if errors on the Police National Computer let even one undesirable person through the checking system. Equally, inaccurate data should not be allowed to traduce a blameless individual'.
The number of wrong Disclosure checks, which are issued to people working with children or vulnerable adults in England and Wales, was revealed by home office minister Hilary Benn in the House of Commons on 19 March. He said, 'Up to and including the end of February 2003 there have been 400 instances where applicant details supplied by the CRB to the police has led to mistakenly matching conviction details with an applicant.'
Mr Benn pointed out that this figure represented 0.03 per cent of all Disclosures issued out of a total of 1,269,367 and said procedures were in place to enable individuals to dispute any information that arises from a police check. 'If upon investigation the CRB finds that the conviction does not relate to the person for whom the Disclosure was issued they will reissue a corrected Disclosure free of charge,' he added.
Responding to the figures a Home Office spokeswoman said, 'The CRB can't have a 100 per cent safeguard. We are only talking about a very small proportion and this can be rectified.' She said the number of applications outstanding after three weeks was now at its lowest level of 33,003, down from a high of 109,231.
The Government had waived the 12 Disclosure fee for applications relating to jobs in childcare during the first year of the CRB's operation.
A Department for Education and Skills spokeswoman said that no decision had been made whether to continue the subsidy. 'In the meantime we will continue to pay for these checks,' she added.