July registration of the new Vetting & Barring Scheme HALTED

Secretary of State for the Home Department Theresa May, has announced the ISA Vetting & Barring Scheme due to start on 26th July 2010 is under review and has been halted with immediate effect by the new coalition government with a view to remodelling the scheme to common sense levels.

The terms of reference for the remodelling of the VBS and the criminal records regime are currently being considered and further announcement will be made in due course.

CRB and AccessNI will stay the same and changes made in October 2009 when the scheme began are still in place. Organisations should continue to use there existing safeguarding practices including the use of enhanced CRB/AccessNI disclosures where required by law or deemed appropriate by employers.

As the new purple application forms had already been issued to registered bodies in readiness for the launch, to reduce inconvenience these can still be used from 28th June 2010 and will be held and processed from 26th July 2010. In processing applications on this form the criminal records bureau will extract and ignore the sections that capture ISA registration requirements and use only the fields required to process a CRB check.

For more detailed information, timetables for applications, new costings and to register for regular updates please go to www.isa-gov.org.uk