Capita to access police records?

Home secretary David Blunkett wants to allow services supplier Capita to access the Police National Computer (PNC) to ease the pressure on the beleaguered Criminal Records Bureau (CRB).

The CRB has struggled with the huge number of applications for criminal records checks since its launch last year.

The enormous backlog threatened to bring the agency to a standstill at the start of the academic year last autumn.

Capita holds the £400m private finance initiative contract to operate the CRB. The agency is responsible for running police checks on employees in sensitive jobs such as teachers and carers.

Under current laws only pre-vetted public servants can access criminal records. But Blunkett has tabled an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill that would allow private sector employees similar powers.

The Home Office says the changes are being made in response to recommendations from an independent review team brought in to assess the situation at the CRB.

'One of the recommendations was about improving end to end process efficiency and this is part of that,' said a spokeswoman.

'It will allow the flexible deployment of staff to where bottlenecks are occurring and would mean applications could be checked against the PNC by both agency and Capita staff where necessary.'

The Liberal Democrats published a report recently claiming ministers had put lives at risk by allowing the CRB initiative to go ahead.

The agency is 'drowning in paper' with a backlog of 35,667 queries, says the report.

'The Criminal Records Bureau has descended from farce into fiasco,' Liberal Democrat MP Paul Burstow told Computing.

'The decision to allow private company employees to access confidential records because of the continual incompetence of the CRB beggars belief.

'Quite simply, the CRB is a badly botched, under-performing bureaucratic nightmare, limping along because of a ham-fisted PFI initiative.'

The Criminal Justice Bill will also include a clause rendering anyone improperly disclosing information subject to a £4000 fine or a year in gaol.

The amendment will be debated in parliament next week.