THE county council was unable to see whether staff had up to date criminal record checks because of failings with a computer system, it has admitted.

Councillors were told yesterday that Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS checks) had not been monitored sufficiently since 2015 until last month.

The council said a fault had begun to appear on an IT system in December 2016. At first it was ad hoc but had become more widespread and it was properly diagnosed last November.

The faults meant DBS checks for new starters and current employees were not 'consistently uploaded' from December 2016.

It meant there were inaccurate records upload – but that has now been resolved.

The council's HR director Steve Munn said where DBS rechecks were found to be overdue, some were 'due to managers not acting on reminders but some were due to policy change in September 2016 where some posts were missing the relevant flag to trigger a reminder'.

The council said the fault in the system was fixed in March and that all backdated records have now been uploaded.

Mr Munn wrote in a report: "The HR team is checking every employee and their record to ensure the records are accurate, that any expired DBS checks are carried out and the right flags are set on the record. This work will be complete by the end of April."