How to get a DBS check

A basic check shows unspent convictions and conditional cautions only, applying the rehabilitation periods in the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. Anyone can apply for their own basic check, and any employer can ask for one for any role. It is the level used for most ordinary employment where no special eligibility exists.

A standard check shows spent and unspent convictions, cautions, reprimands and final warnings held on the Police National Computer, subject to filtering. It is available only for roles specified in the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order — accountancy, law, financial services roles, security industry work, and similar positions of trust.

An enhanced check shows everything a standard check shows plus any information a chief police officer reasonably believes to be relevant to the role and considers ought to be disclosed. That non-conviction police information is the significant difference: it can include allegations that were never charged, and it is disclosed at police discretion.

An enhanced check with barred list information additionally checks whether the person appears on the children's barred list, the adults' barred list, or both. That is available only where the role is regulated activity as defined by the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 — broadly, frequent or unsupervised work with children or adults receiving certain services.

Eligibility is a legal question and the DBS publishes an eligibility checking tool for employers. Where the role is not eligible, the check simply cannot be requested, and requesting one anyway is an offence. This is the reason someone volunteering informally, or working in a care-adjacent role that is not regulated activity, is told an enhanced check is unavailable.

It is also an offence for an employer to require you to use the subject access route under data protection law to obtain a copy of your own police record and hand it over — so-called enforced subject access. If an employer asks for that, it is asking you to help it commit an offence, and the Information Commissioner's Office is the body that regulates it.

Volunteers can have checks processed without a fee where the DBS definition of a volunteer is met — unpaid, not for a close relative, and not a placement leading to a qualification in a way that excludes it. The definition is narrower than the everyday meaning of the word, so it is worth checking rather than assuming.

For a basic check, apply directly through GOV.UK's service. You will need identity documents, addresses for the last five years, your National Insurance number and, if you have one, your driving licence or passport details. The certificate is sent to you and only to you.

For a standard or enhanced check, the employer starts the process, either directly if it is a registered body or through an umbrella body if not. You complete the application and provide identity documents to a verifier at the organisation, and the DBS then checks the Police National Computer, the barred lists where applicable, and asks relevant police forces for local information on an enhanced check.

Get your identity documents right first time. The DBS specifies acceptable combinations, and applications are routinely rejected for documents in a former name, addresses that do not match, or an incomplete five-year address history. Gaps and overseas periods need explaining rather than leaving blank.

Time spent living abroad may require an overseas criminal record check as well. The UK check only covers UK records, so an employer recruiting someone who has lived overseas will often ask for a certificate of good conduct from that country, and those can take considerably longer than the DBS check.

Only you receive the certificate. Since 2013 the applicant's copy is the only copy issued, so the employer sees it when you show it to them. That was a deliberate change to let people dispute inaccurate information before an employer sees it, and it is worth using — read your certificate carefully before handing it over.

Timescales vary considerably. Basic and standard checks are usually fast because they are database lookups; enhanced checks depend on how quickly each police force responds, and a check involving several forces can take much longer. The DBS publishes performance data, and if a check has stalled you can ask it to be escalated.

Consider the Update Service. For an annual subscription, and free for volunteers, it allows a certificate to be kept current so a new employer can check its status online instead of applying for a fresh one — provided the new role is the same level and type. Subscribe within the short window after the certificate is issued, because you cannot join later on that certificate.

Filtering removes certain old or minor matters from standard and enhanced certificates. It applies automatically — you do not apply for it — and the rules changed materially in 2020 after the Supreme Court found aspects of the previous scheme incompatible with the right to private life.

Under the current rules, youth cautions, reprimands and final warnings are no longer automatically disclosed, and the previous rule that a person with more than one conviction had everything disclosed regardless of age or seriousness was removed. Individual convictions can be filtered after specified periods, which differ for offences committed as an adult and as a child.

Some things are never filtered. Convictions and cautions for offences on a specified list — broadly serious violent and sexual offences and offences relevant to safeguarding — remain disclosable indefinitely, as do convictions resulting in a custodial sentence and, generally, current or repeated matters within the relevant period.

Filtering does not erase anything. The record still exists, it can still be considered where a role is exempt, and a filtered matter can still be disclosed as police information on an enhanced check if a chief officer considers it relevant. Filtering governs the automatic printing of convictions, not the whole certificate.

Separately from filtering, the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 makes most sentences spent after a rehabilitation period, after which you are generally treated as if the conviction had not happened. A spent conviction does not appear on a basic check and does not have to be disclosed for most jobs. The periods depend on the sentence and on whether you were an adult at the time.

The two systems interact confusingly. A conviction can be spent under the 1974 Act but still appear on a standard or enhanced certificate because the role is exempt and the matter is not filtered. Understanding which regime applies to a particular job is the practical question, and GOV.UK's tool for checking whether you need to tell someone about a criminal record works through it.

Unlock, a charity for people with convictions, publishes detailed guidance on filtering, disclosure and how to handle applications, and provides a free helpline. For anyone with a record trying to work out what they must say and to whom, it is the most useful single resource available.

If a certificate contains information you say is wrong — a conviction that is not yours, a matter recorded inaccurately, or information that should have been filtered — raise a dispute with the DBS. Do it promptly and before giving the certificate to the employer, which is precisely why only you receive it.

Where the disputed material is police information on an enhanced certificate rather than a conviction record, the dispute goes to the chief officer of the force that supplied it, and there is an independent monitor who reviews decisions about the disclosure of police information. That is a genuine review by someone outside the force.

Being on a barred list is a separate and much more serious matter. Barring decisions carry their own representation process before a final decision, and an appeal against a barring decision goes to the Upper Tribunal with permission, on a point of law or a mistake of fact. Take specialist advice — this is not a self-help process.

An employer is entitled to take a criminal record into account, but not automatically. Blanket policies of refusing anyone with any record are poor practice and can be discriminatory in effect, and good practice — set out in DBS and Ministry of Justice guidance — is to consider the nature of the offence, how long ago it was, its relevance to the role, and the person's circumstances since.

You are entitled to be given the opportunity to explain. Where a certificate shows something unexpected, ask for a conversation rather than assuming the offer is gone, and be ready to explain what happened, what has changed, and why the role is not affected. Employers withdraw offers far more often over concealment than over the underlying matter.

Do not conceal something that will appear. Failing to disclose when asked lawfully is usually treated as dishonesty, which is a dismissal issue in its own right and is far harder to recover from than the conviction would have been. Where the role is not exempt and the conviction is spent, you are entitled to say you have none.

Employers must handle certificate information under data protection law: a lawful basis, a policy on the handling of criminal conviction data, secure storage and prompt destruction. If an employer photocopies certificates and keeps them indefinitely, that is a matter for the Information Commissioner's Office.

The Disclosure and Barring Service covers England and Wales, and it also handles barred list functions with UK-wide effect. The basic, standard and enhanced levels described above are the DBS structure, and GOV.UK guidance describes it.

Scotland runs its own system through Disclosure Scotland, and it is structured differently rather than merely branded differently. Scotland uses disclosure levels rather than the England and Wales terminology, and the central feature is the Protecting Vulnerable Groups scheme, established by the Protection of Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Act 2007. PVG is a membership scheme: rather than obtaining a check for each role, a person joins the scheme for regulated work with children or protected adults and is then continuously monitored, with Disclosure Scotland notified of new information as it arises.

That continuous monitoring is a genuine structural advantage over the England and Wales model, where a certificate is a snapshot on a date and the Update Service only tells an employer whether anything has changed since. Scottish employers in regulated work check PVG scheme membership rather than commissioning a fresh check.

Northern Ireland uses AccessNI, part of the Department of Justice, which issues basic, standard and enhanced certificates on a broadly comparable model to the DBS but under Northern Irish legislation and with its own registered and umbrella body arrangements, its own fee structure and its own dispute and appeal routes. AccessNI operates its own filtering rules, and its guidance on disputing and appealing a certificate is separate from the DBS process.

Certificates are generally recognised across the UK by employers, but the scheme you must use is determined by where the work is, not by where you live. Someone living in Carlisle and taking a job in Dumfries needs PVG scheme membership, not a DBS certificate, and someone moving from Belfast to Manchester will need a DBS check rather than relying on an AccessNI certificate.

The barring lists are the exception that ties the systems together. A barring decision made by the DBS applies across the United Kingdom, and Disclosure Scotland and AccessNI share information with it, so someone barred in one jurisdiction cannot simply work in regulated activity in another.