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too boring for Ven but might be of interest to others
The speed at which mandatory criminal checks are being completed by the Metropolitan Police is of "great concern", a government department said.
A Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check is needed to work with children or vulnerable adults.
The London force has 50,570 outstanding applications. The Met says that is down from 83,000 in April and more people have been brought in to process cases.
One nurse said she lost her job after an eight-month wait for clearance.
A DBS check is supposed to take two to four weeks, with no checks taking longer than 60 days. But just over half of cases - 51.9% - are dealt with within 61 days and on average, it takes 107 days.
This is more than twice as long as the next worst performing police force, North Yorkshire.
The Met handles a significant proportion of DBS cases nationally but it has missed government targets on processing background checks for more than two years.
The current average among police forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is 11.8 days.
Graph on Met Police stats on DBS checks
Its increased workload is said to be down to staff shortages and a surge in numbers of people applying for private hire licences who also need checks.
It means employers are having to cope with vacancies after having agreed to employ someone and individuals are losing income because they cannot start jobs until the checks have been made.
A spokesman for the DBS said: "We rely on the Metropolitan Police as an essential partner in processing the enhanced level element of DBS checks.
"The current delay is of great concern to us and our customers."
Interesting the top 4 slowest are London,Manchester,North Yorkshire and Nottingham bit I think we all knew that
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lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector
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