1. DBS business plan 2023 -2024
2. 1. Chairman and Chief Executive’s foreword
In 2020, the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) board launched its five-year strategy for the period 2020-25. We are now entering the fourth year of our strategic journey, and have just published the midpoint refresh of our strategy, covering 2023 to 2025, recognising that we are in a very different place to where we were when the strategy was first co-created.
Over the past 12 months, we have adapted to the post-COVID era, embedding our hybrid-by-default working approach for staff across the organisation and continuing our fast-track checks of the Barred Lists. We supported the wider government’s Homes for Ukraine scheme, helping to safeguard families and individuals affected by the Russian invasion, by providing DBS checks for sponsors. We have also reduced the cost of our disclosure products this year by an average of 16%, despite the ongoing cost-of-living crisis.
In 2022-23, DBS achieved reaccreditation with the Customer Service Excellence standards, and for the second time, we were recognised as the highest rated public service organisation for customer satisfaction, by the UK Customer Satisfaction Index.
To support the development of our people, the last year also included the launch of the DBS Academy, an in-house learning and development platform, as well as the launch of the innovation function and framework to support future initiatives, and improve the impact we have on the communities we serve.
2023-24 will be another notable year for DBS. We have set out an ambitious but pragmatic workplan for the year ahead, recognising the cost-of-living crisis that the UK faces, as we continue to adapt to this new post-COVID world.
We will continue to strive for performance improvements as we re-enforce an ‘outcomes’ focus across our processes, and we will continue to modernise our services through the replacement of legacy systems and further digitisation of our disclosure products. We will work to enhance our Update Service offering, and continue to improve our ways of working with partners, such as the police, driving performance improvements in certificate production.
The next 12 months will also see the introduction of a new value for money framework, legislative changes to rehabilitation periods across the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, and the integration of evaluating efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and economy in all that we do.
Finally, we will continue to progress the objectives most closely relating to our people, embedding the DBS Academy and continuing to work towards our equality, diversity, and inclusion aspirations as an organisation. We look forward to the year ahead, and to working with our employees, partners, and customers as we continue to achieve our vision of making recruitment and employment safer.
3. 2. Introduction
The DBS 2023-24 business plan focuses on the actions we need to take over the next 12 months to deliver the ambitions set out in our refreshed strategy.
Quality remains central to our work and improving the quality of our services and the decisions we make is at the core of everything we do. Our intention is to continue to modernise the services we provide, the way we work, and the way we interact with our partners. This year, accessibility also forms a significant part of our quality focus.
The actions we will deliver this year are derived from our renewed vision and values, our streamlined strategic priorities, and the deliverables we have outlined in our refreshed strategy. We believe they will make meaningful contributions to improving the quality of service we provide, enhancing the technology we use, raising our profile, and improving our work with, and for, our customers, partners, and staff.
This year’s business plan includes a balanced mix of transformational changes and deliverables that will form part of ‘business as usual’, with transformational changes and inclusivity at the forefront.
Delivery of the business plan is supported this year by the 2023-25 refreshed strategy, alongside the directorate plans within DBS that help facilitate its achievement.
4. 3. Who we are and what we do
DBS provides disclosure and barring functions on behalf of government. This includes DBS checks for England, Wales, Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man, and barring functions for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. We carry out this work from bases in Darlington and Liverpool, with employees both in these areas, and across the UK.
DBS was created under the provisions of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. We are a non-departmental public body (NDPB) accountable to Parliament through the Secretary of State for the Home Office. We provide an important service, helping to safeguard and protect people in our society while ensuring proportionality and protecting the rights of individuals. We do this by providing relevant information and, where necessary, making barring decisions to help employers make safer recruitment decisions.
DBS issues four levels of certificates of criminal records, known as DBS certificates, and we operate a system of updating certificates through our Update Service. We also bar individuals from working or volunteering in certain circumstances. Our work is funded by the fees from our disclosure (DBS check) customers.
4.1 Basic DBS check
A Basic DBS check is available for any position or purpose. A Basic certificate will contain details of convictions and conditional cautions that are considered to be unspent.
4.2 Standard DBS check
Standard DBS certificates show relevant convictions and cautions held on the Police National Computer (PNC), subject to filtering rules.
4.3 Enhanced DBS check
An Enhanced DBS check is available to anyone involved in work with vulnerable groups, and other positions involving a high degree of trust. Enhanced certificates contain the same information as a Standard certificate, with the addition of relevant local police force information.
4.4 Enhanced with Barred List(s) DBS check
An Enhanced with Barred List(s) DBS certificate contains the same information as an Enhanced DBS certificate but includes details of whether the individual is included on one or both of the Barred Lists. These lists include individuals barred from working with children and vulnerable groups where the role is in regulated activity.
4.5 Barring
We make considered decisions about whether an individual should be barred from engaging in regulated activity with children and/or adults and maintain the Children’s and Adults’ Barred Lists. We also make decisions as to whether it is appropriate to remove a person from a Barred List.
4.6 Enhanced DBS checks for healthcare professionals
Since 2020, we have supported the government’s COVID-19 response with a temporary service for certain health and social work roles. When an application for a DBS check comes in for a role relating to COVID-19, we will do a check of the relevant Barred List(s) within 24 hours. A full Enhanced DBS check is then progressed. This service is scheduled to end on 11 May 2023. Future urgent Barred List checks will be provided via our Adult First service.
5. 4. DBS priorities and strategic objectives
5.1 Our Purpose
Protecting the public by helping employers make safer recruitment and employment decisions, and by barring individuals who pose a risk to vulnerable people.
5.2 Our Vision
We will make recruitment and employment safer, by being a visible, trusted, and influential organisation. We will provide an outstanding quality of service to all of our customers and partners. Our people will understand the important contributions they make to safeguarding, and feel proud to work within an inclusive and increasingly diverse organisation.
5.3 Our strategic priorities
We have identified four strategic priorities that underpin everything we do.
5.4 Quality
We will deliver the highest possible quality of products and services, to the highest standard of practice and integrity.
5.5 Diversity and Inclusion
We will increase the diversity of our workforce, the representation in our decision making and service offering, and the inclusivity of our operations and the services we provide.
5.6 Sustainability and Wellbeing
We will look towards increased sustainability in the improvement of our products and services, and enhanced focus on the wellbeing of our people and customers.
5.7 Value for Money
We will achieve the most optimal value from how we work, where we work, and who we work with, for our customers and stakeholders.
The priorities carry tangible deliverables to ensure that we retain a focus and momentum on activities that make a difference for the whole of DBS, as well as for our partners and stakeholders.
In addition to our strategic priorities, we have worked with our staff, partners, and stakeholders, to streamline our six existing strategic objectives (SOs) into four refreshed strategic objectives. The remaining two years of our strategy will focus on delivering these.
The four refreshed objectives, which we feel will help us deliver our vision of making recruitment and employment safer, are:
5.8 SO1: Customer Experience
We will provide increased reliability, consistency, timeliness, and accessibility of service for our customers, increasing quality and value for money.
5.9 SO2: Technology
We will drive efficiencies and value for money across DBS, and foster a culture of innovation through a modern, stable, secure, and accessible estate.
5.10 SO3: Making a Difference
We will strengthen our reputation as a recognised and trusted deliverer of public services, and an expert reference body for our contribution to safeguarding for society.
5.11 SO4: Our People and Organisation
We will make DBS a modern workplace where our talented and diverse workforce are empowered to do their jobs, and fulfil their public duty.
6. 5. Delivering our strategic objectives
To achieve our vision and deliver year four of our strategy, we have identified a number of deliverables to be completed this year, with some spanning the next two years. These deliverables are detailed across the next few pages. We have strong governance in place through our board, committees, and Strategic Leadership Team (SLT) to ensure we focus attention on delivering the priorities in the plan.
All deliverables will be tracked monthly by SLT, and assurance will be completed by our Quality, Finance and Performance Committee and People Committee. As the focus this year continues to be on transformational changes, these will also be tracked through our Change and Transformation board, and assured by our Change Management Committee.
As our delivery progresses, we will use our governance processes to make decisions to ensure our strategic approaches and milestones continue to be appropriate and valid for this plan.
7. 6. Strategic Objective One Delivering our strategic objectives
We will provide increased reliability, consistency, timeliness, and accessibility of service for our customers, increasing quality and value for money.
In the first three years of our strategy, we progressed changes that ensured compliance with future safeguarding legislation, improved the quality and inclusivity of our existing products and services, and we mapped out future service improvements. We commenced the embedding of our Safeguarding and Quality charter, and our Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion charter, by improving our approach to both the quality and accessibility of our services. To support future service improvements, we established an innovation framework for DBS, as well as a plan of research and horizon-scanning activities.
This year, we will strengthen our outward-facing policies and procedures for Responsible Organisations (ROs) and Registered Bodies (RBs). We will increase automation, and reduce manual matching of people’s information with PNC records, to improve quality and consistency, which, in turn, will enable additional capacity for service improvement, accessibility, and assurance.
We will develop detailed plans to address accessibility issues for our customers. We will broaden and deepen staff understanding of the Safeguarding and Quality charter to ensure that managers and teams understand how their work contributes. By integrating the DBS outcome framework into value-for-money metrics, we will also enhance the way we demonstrate value for money in the services we provide.
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*Milestone has been framed to cover a two-year period, and will also appear in the 2024-25 business plan
8. 7. Strategic Objective Two
We will drive efficiencies and value for money across DBS, and foster a culture of innovation through a modern, stable, secure, and accessible estate.
In the first three years of our strategy, we focused on maintaining and enhancing our existing technology. It was critical that we replaced and stabilised our legacy estate, while building capability to progress modernisation of our digital services. There was a focus on moving towards paperless applications and digital certificates, and ensuring we had the technology tools we needed to be an efficient organisation.
This started with a whole-scale transfer of our services to a new operating model and relentless efforts to upgrade our systems while maintaining effective service performance. Our approach has enabled us to deploy technology solutions supporting COVID-19 fast-track checks of the Barred Lists, the application of new filtering rules, and the Homes for Ukraine scheme. This was in addition to delivery of our technology roadmap, including the ongoing implementation of paperless applications for Standard, Enhanced, and Enhanced with Barred List(s) DBS checks.
This year, we have an ambitious set of deliverables that include a new accessible Standard and Enhanced application service for RBs, an accessible, online results service for DBS customers, and progress towards an improved, accessible DBS check update/ subscription capability.
We will also improve data quality and decision making through a range of actions, including data mapping across systems to understand where gaps exist, implementing tactical improvements to the PLX algorithm which compares individuals’ information against police databases, and migrating our automated check processes to a new, and more accessible, cloud-based solution. We also will establish a new data management practice which will include the implementation of strategic police data integration services.
In strengthening our operating model, we will decommission redundant software and infrastructure, and better maintain, refine, and develop the products and services we offer to the public, employers, and other organisations that we work with.
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*Milestone has been framed to cover a two-year period, and will also appear in the 2024-25 business plan
9. 8. Strategic Objective Three
We will strengthen our reputation as a recognised and trusted deliverer of public services, and as a source of specialist expertise which, in turn, contributes to safeguarding our society.
The first three years of our strategy focused on growing the profile of DBS as a professional and trusted organisation.
We launched our Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion charter, and strengthened our capability to deliver marketing and business development activities. We also widened our social media communication channels, introduced the DBS employee engagement forum, and completed our new employee engagement survey. Additionally, we aligned our communications planning to the government functional standard for communication, and started to review and refine our online website content to ensure it is streamlined and accessible for all customer groups.
Last year, we embedded a more effective model for supplier management and compliance to support the effective and efficient delivery of our services. We also moved to an increasingly outcomes-focused planning model, to better demonstrate how we contribute to safeguarding objectives.
This year, we will develop an extended suite of external campaigns, which will include engaging with organisations and influencers that link to the rehabilitation of offenders, and supporting product development required to increase employment for ex-offenders. We will deliver the changes required by any new legislation and policy, and we will also implement a stakeholder tracking and evaluation framework for our work with external partners.
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10. 9. Strategic Objective Four
We will make DBS a modern workplace where our talented and diverse workforce are empowered to do their jobs and fulfil our public duty.
In the first three years of our strategy, we concentrated on the development of the DBS Academy as we worked to become an exemplar organisation and employer of choice. We produced an action plan to act on the findings of our 2021-22 employee engagement survey, and we continued to deliver the commitments in our Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion strategic plan. We delivered year two of the DBS Wellbeing strategic plan, promoted initiatives that benefitted our local communities through the use of volunteer days, and established a joint network to support the maturation of equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) throughout DBS. We also created a joint vision for future of work and outlined a plan, as part of the refreshed DBS strategy. In addition, there has also been a reduction in our carbon footprint, through our move to more remote working, reduction in printing, travel, and the associated use of resources, and through a move towards the electronic scanning of barring records.
This year, we will explore options for future ways of working to ensure they meet the needs of our people, our customers, and our organisation. We will improve flexible working arrangements for all staff, which will provide a greater balance of effectiveness for the organisation, whilst meeting the needs of our people. We will have a more effective approach to developing the skills and capability of our staff, focusing on under-represented groups. We will do this through measures such as expanding workforce planning to include critical post analysis and succession planning, as well as implementing a range of purpose[1]built development programmes, including apprenticeships. We will rollout EDI training for managers and staff, and continue measures to ensure that staff are appropriately rewarded and fairly recognised for their achievements.
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11. 10. Measuring success against the plan – key performance indicators
Performance management is one of the controls we use to ensure we are delivering against the strategic objectives in the refreshed strategy and contributing to the outcomes desired by the Home Office (HO) and government for citizens and society. The Home Office has four priority outcomes in its Outcome Delivery Plan.
DBS contributes to HO Priority Outcome 1: Reduce Crime. DBS also contributes to other government priority outcomes, including those for health and social care, employment, education, protecting the public, and economic growth.
We measure our progress using a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and targets agreed by our board. Our KPIs are grouped into four themes: quality, timeliness, value for money, and people. We have a strong focus on the quality and timeliness of our products and services. These are the issues that customers tell us are important to them and it is these that ensure we are supporting the safeguarding of vulnerable groups including children, as effectively as possible.
As part of our performance management framework (PMF), progress towards targets is reviewed monthly by our Strategic Leadership Team and board, with the Quality, Finance and Performance Committee and People Committee providing assurance that performance is being managed appropriately. KPIs are supplemented by other measures which operate at a corporate, directorate, service, and team level.
We will continue to strive to achieve all of our performance targets in 2023-24, and in some cases, we have stretched our targets where we feel we are able to do better. We have improved transparency for the public by providing labels that describe in plain English what our KPIs mean to our customers and employees, and have linked these to our strategic commitments.
11.1 Quality
Our quality KPIs support our commitment to providing high quality, reliable, consistent, and accessible services for our customers. Quality is at the heart of everything we do, as outlined in our Safeguarding and Quality charter.
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11.2 Timeliness
Our timeliness KPIs help us to demonstrate our speed of service to the public, ensuring safeguarding decisions can be made at pace by employers and that those individuals who should not be allowed to work with vulnerable groups including children are identified and barred as quickly as possible.
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11.3 Value for money
We recognise there is a cost for our services borne by employers and individuals, as we are funded by the fees from our disclosure (DBS check) customers. Our value for money KPIs assist us in demonstrating these commitments to the public. We adhere to the principles of Managing Public Money and we aim to improve our efficiency during the life of the DBS 2020- 25 strategy.
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11.4 People
We are committed to developing a talented, diverse, and inclusive workforce that is engaged in delivering the best possible services to the public. Our people KPIs demonstrate progress against the People commitments in our strategy. We have a range of more detailed People measures, and breakthrough diversity measures that we use internally.
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12. 11. Strategic risks to delivery of the plan
We identify, assess, manage, and review risk through the process defined by the DBS Risk Management framework. Risks are held at a strategic, corporate, and directorate level. Risks are reviewed on a monthly basis by SLT and our Associate Directors Group, and periodically by the DBS board, with the Audit and Risk Committee providing assurance that risk is being appropriately managed. The table opposite shows strategic risks that would adversely impact on the delivery of business plan objectives if they materialised.
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13. 12. Budget – delivery of the plan
The budget sets our estimated costs to deliver our services and business priorities this financial year, reflecting financial estimates of service demand, efficiency, and risk. The budget reflects the business plan milestones that support the delivery of our strategic objectives.
A key achievement will be the maintaining of our fees for our products at current levels. We delivered substantial reductions in fees for our disclosure (DBS check) products last year, and have been able to maintain this reduction despite significant national inflationary pressures. The efficiencies driven through our value for money KPI will allow us to continue to deliver products and services that represent value for money to our customers, and to the Home Office in future years.
The budget overall is in line with our financial goal of a balanced budget with a fair view of risk and opportunity. As we enter year four of our strategy, our business activities continue to support ongoing transformational change and efficiency set out in our strategy. Our modernisation plans remain dependent on capital funding availability within government, but we are on track to deliver our capital-dependent commitments within the life of the DBS 2020-25 strategy.
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