Recommendation 7

The Cabinet Office could not provide us with any information on how many people were abandoning jobs due to vetting delays. The NAO reported that cancellations of clearance requests were 19% higher from April to November 2022 compared with the same period in 2021–22, and that requests were most likely cancelled because the individual being vetted secured an alternative job. The Cabinet Office said at our February session that it had done further research following the NAO report and expanded on the list of reasons why individuals may no longer need a clearance, such as retirement, moving to a job with lower security status or simply failing to provide the information in time and therefore being timed out. It claimed that “the cancellations are not people pulling out of the process” and that “for the moment at least, there does not seem to be any evidence that, even in a very competitive job market, the vetting process is losing good candidates”. The Cabinet Office also considered that the increase in cancellations was proportionate to the overall increase in the number of cases received.16 Poor demand forecasting and lack of resilience