Tower Hamlets Council's Audit Committee has raised concerns over significant delays in Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks, with some outstanding for nearly two and a half years. The committee, meeting on Thursday 12 March 2026, reviewed the internal audit progress report which, while detailing a decline in the number of outstanding management actions, highlighted the concerning age of some of these actions.
David Robbs, Head of Internal Audit, confirmed that these historic actions were being escalated through corporate directors. He acknowledged that progress needed to be made to address them, noting that the continued delay means the underlying risks associated with these checks are not being adequately managed. The committee discussed the need for management to understand and address the underlying risks.
Councillor Marc Francis expressed particular concern about the age of some outstanding actions, specifically DBS checks, which are considered serious. He questioned whether the Audit Committee needed to take further action to ensure their implementation.
Richard Ennis, Interim Section 151 Officer, acknowledged the concerns and stated that while progress was being made, some of the outstanding actions were proving difficult to resolve. He suggested that with the reduced number of outstanding actions, the committee could now consider delving into specific cases and potentially asking management to present updates on these actions directly.
Mr Robbs explained that the difficulty in resolving some of these long-standing issues stems from a lack of corporate memory.
He stated, in some of these circumstances you have a position where the corporate memory doesn't understand what the issue is and therefore there's a little bit work that my team gets involved in teasing out the issues and explaining what the issue was in a very historic piece of audit work.
He further elaborated that some of the offices in those areas of course knew and weren't present when the audit was carried out and so weren't necessarily cited on the findings at the time so there are some there are some historical issues there that we're grappling with.
The report indicated that 23 management actions remained outstanding, with 16 of these being high priority. The committee discussed the process for escalating these historic actions and the need for management to understand and address the underlying risks. The meeting agenda can be found here.
