e-Bulk: taking the criminal out of the public sector electronically

Friday, April 17, 2009

The Criminal Record Bureau's Adele Townsend tells Mike Lowe about the CRB's work to deliver improved e-government services to all its public sector customers through e-Bulk

The number of roles in the public and private sector that require that extra level of vetting is expected to increase, according to the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB). With the potential for scandals in healthcare and childcare always a threat and continual calls for more security personnel to tackle the terror threat, organisations like the CRB play a crucial role in sorting out the suitable from the unsuitable.

CRB checks the criminal background of 3.5 million people every year and in a move to make this process quicker and more efficient, it has launched its new system – e-Bulk. Whilst your local martial arts school or swimming club may request the odd CRB check for a coach or equivalent position, large public sector organisations can make thousands of requests every year and create a tremendous burden on the CRB.

According to Adele Townsend, director of programmes and corporate services at the CRB, e-Bulk has been designed to help those organisations who require a lot of CRB checks to be made. Any customers of CRB who make more than 3,000 checks a year can now use e-Bulk to send multiple applications and receive the results electronically.

Currently a CRB check is sent and received through the postal system, which can take longer than an electronic application. A postal application can also have a greater number of errors as they are often not spotted until the form reaches the CRB, meaning the form must be sent back again for editing.

Townsend says the new e-Bulk system hopes to tackle that and more. It will offer faster results, reducing the average processing time by around five days; there will be fewer forms to complete, with the facility for customers to integrate the CRB application into their already established recruitment processes; reduced inaccuracy as the e-Bulk system checks the form's completeness before sending; and the resulting certificate will be sent electronically, increasing the document's security and speeding up its delivery time.

The new e-Bulk service was developed in response to customer feedback in 2007, Townsend explains, which said more than two-thirds of customers wanted to be able submit multiple applications online. Now that the service is ready, the CRB has surveyed its members to discover their levels of interest. So far, she says, they have had 50 who expressed "immediate interest" with over two-thirds saying they will sign up to the service at some point. Girlguiding UK has become the first of 34 members who have already signed up to the service.

"We're doing a phased roll-out, which we believe to be the sensible way when we're introducing something new and technical," she says.

The e-Bulk system appears to be a positive example of public sector data sharing, something which is considered increasingly rare at the moment. Townsend explains that it requires minimal hardware investment from their customers and is positive about its future success as it makes use of existing secure infrastructure to transmit the information.

"It's system to system connection. We do it through the criminal justice system exchange. The criminal justice exchange validates the batches and sends them onto us through the Government Secure Intranet (GSI). We then send the results in XML format back to them over GSI to that exchange and then they access the results via that exchange using a secure file transfer protocol," she says.

Townsend says the CRB also envisage efficiency savings to be created for both the CRB and its customers from the new online system. Although there is a cost for members to implement the service, the savings from the administrative costs should offset that and then create further savings in the future. Townsend is also keen to reveal that the savings they are expecting from this new system means they will keep their prices the same for the fourth year running.

It has taken the CRB seven years, as it was set up in 2002, to devise and implement what some could construe as a fairly simple and common-sense solution. All public sector organisations have been seeking new ways to make their services electronic since the beginning of the 21st century, so why has it taken the CRB so long?

"When we set up the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) we wanted to set up the system, test it, make sure it works and validate it and we've been on a continuous improvement programme ever since we started and we are still on that," she says.

"What this does is represent the first phase of us actually delivering the programme of electronic services to all our customers. So we have constantly improved our services as we go and this is just our next step."

Townsend adds that the CRB wants to roll e-Bulk out to as many of its high-volume registered bodies as it can. Once that is done, she says the CRB has plans to improve the service even further in the future.

"One of the things we're looking at as a real improvement for our customers is looking at the feasibility of continuous updating of the disclosure. At the moment customers receive a disclosure and it represents a snapshot in time of their history from that point backwards. Yet something could happen that is not recorded. So we want to look at the feasibility of introducing a continuous updating service so that people don't have to keep sending in new applications all the time, they will just have it continually updated. That's really the next big thing we're looking at," she adds.