There is a small, strange moment that comes with hiring a cleaner, and most people never quite name it. You hand a set of keys to someone you have met twice, agree that they will be alone in your flat every Tuesday while you are at work, and then you go about your day trying not to think about it. In a city where your neighbours might be complete strangers and your front door opens onto a communal hallway shared with fourteen other flats, that is a real act of faith. The question sitting underneath it – can I trust this person in my home? – is exactly the question a DBS check is meant to help answer.
So it makes sense that “DBS checked” appears on cleaning company websites all over London, from Clapham to Crouch End, usually as a reassuring badge near the booking button. The trouble is that most people have no real idea what the phrase means. Which level of check does it refer to? Is a cleaner even allowed to hold the higher levels? And how would you ever confirm the certificate is real, rather than a line of marketing copy typed into a template? A trust signal you cannot verify is not much of a trust signal at all, so it is worth taking the whole thing apart.
What a DBS Check Actually Is
A DBS check is an official criminal record check carried out by the Disclosure and Barring Service, a public body sponsored by the Home Office. It came into being in 2012, when the old Criminal Records Bureau merged with the Independent Safeguarding Authority. That last detail matters more than it looks. If a cleaning company still advertises itself as “CRB checked,” it is leaning on a term that has been out of date for more than a decade, which tells you something quietly useful about how closely the firm keeps up with its own paperwork.
What it does is simple enough: it searches police records and returns a certificate showing some or all of a person’s criminal history, depending on the level requested. What most people get wrong is assuming there is a single kind of check – one pass-or-fail gate a cleaner either clears or doesn’t. There are actually several, and the differences between them are the entire story.
The Three Levels, and Which One a Cleaner Can Actually Hold
There are three main levels of DBS check, plus a fourth variant, and each reveals progressively more.
A Basic check shows any unspent convictions and conditional cautions. “Unspent” is the key word: under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, most convictions become spent after a set period and drop off a Basic check entirely. Anyone can apply for one directly through gov.uk, for any role, with no eligibility test whatsoever. It currently costs £21.50.
A Standard check goes deeper, showing spent as well as unspent convictions, along with cautions, reprimands and final warnings, subject to filtering rules. It also costs £21.50. The catch: you cannot request one for yourself in the ordinary way, because the role has to be legally eligible.
An Enhanced check includes everything on a Standard one, plus any additional intelligence a local police force considers relevant to the role. It costs £49.50, and eligibility is tighter again. The top variant, an Enhanced check with a barred list check, also confirms whether a person appears on the official lists of people prohibited from working with children or with vulnerable adults.
Now for the part almost every “DBS checked” badge skips over. Cleaning, on its own, does not qualify for a Standard or Enhanced check. Eligibility is tied to the nature of the work, and ordinary cleaning – even in someone’s home, even unsupervised – is not what the law defines as regulated activity. The NHS puts this beyond doubt: cleaning duties, taken in isolation, are not eligible for a check above Basic level. So when a firm assures you that every cleaner is “fully DBS checked,” the honest translation, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is a Basic check. That is not nothing. But it is a long way short of the Enhanced check most people picture when they read the badge.
The Vulnerable-Client Exception, and What Changed in 2026
There is one situation where the whole picture flips. If a cleaner works in the home of someone genuinely vulnerable – an elderly person needing care, a disabled client, a household with young children where the cleaner has regular unsupervised contact – the work can tip over into regulated activity. At that point an Enhanced check becomes both appropriate and, quite often, expected.
Until recently this created an awkward gap. Only an organisation could request an Enhanced check, which meant a self-employed cleaner working directly for a vulnerable client had no legal route to obtain one, however willing they were to be vetted. As of 21 January 2026, that changed. Self-employed workers in eligible roles across England and Wales can now apply for Standard and Enhanced checks through what is called an umbrella body – a registered organisation that submits the application on their behalf. For the independent cleaner who looks after elderly clients across, say, Richmond and Barnes, this is the difference between offering a Basic check and offering the reassurance those households genuinely need.
Agency cleaners occupy a third position. Because the agency is the legal employer, it decides which level of check applies to each placement, and one putting cleaners into care homes, schools or supported housing will be arranging Enhanced checks as a matter of routine.
So Can You Actually Verify One Is Genuine?
Here good intentions hit an awkward fact: there is no public register you can search. You cannot type a cleaner’s name into a government website and see their DBS status. The system is built around the individual’s consent rather than open lookup – a deliberate privacy protection, not an oversight. What you can actually do depends on which check you are dealing with.
For any certificate, the first step is the simplest. Ask to see the original. Not a photograph, not a scan, not a forwarded screenshot – the physical certificate the DBS posted to the cleaner. For Standard and Enhanced checks, the DBS sends the certificate only to the applicant and never to a third party, so that original is the sole copy in existence. It is printed on secure paper carrying a crown-pattern watermark and other security features, and the government publishes a guide showing precisely what a genuine one looks like. A cleaner reluctant to show you the actual document, while perfectly happy to insist it exists somewhere, has told you something without meaning to.
The stronger route is the DBS Update Service, and this is where the earlier point about levels comes back around. The Update Service is an online subscription – £16 a year, free for volunteers – that keeps a certificate live and lets an employer or client check its current status online, instantly and at no cost. It only covers Standard and Enhanced checks, though. Basic checks are not eligible. So the very check that most domestic cleaners actually hold is the one you cannot monitor through the Update Service at all, a limitation that almost nobody selling cleaning services will volunteer.
Where it does apply, the process is quick. With the cleaner’s consent, having seen their original certificate and noted its twelve-digit number, you go to the Update Service on gov.uk and run a status check. You will get one of four answers back: the certificate was clean and remains current; it revealed something but nothing new has surfaced since; it is no longer current and a fresh check is needed; or the details do not match, which usually means the subscription has lapsed or the certificate has been withdrawn. The whole thing takes about a minute.
One last detail undoes a lot of false confidence. A DBS certificate has no expiry date. It is accurate only as at the day it was issued. A cleaner proudly waving a pristine certificate dated 2019 is showing you a snapshot from six years ago – which is exactly the problem the Update Service exists to solve, and why a live status check beats an old certificate every time.
What This Means When You Are Hiring
Pull all this together and the practical picture, for anyone hiring a cleaner in London, is clearer than the marketing lets on.
If you are going through an established agency, ask which level of check their cleaners hold and whether it is registered on the Update Service. A good agency answers without flinching, and some will run the status check while you watch. If you are hiring a self-employed cleaner directly, a Basic check is an entirely reasonable thing to ask for. Anyone can obtain one for £21.50, so a cleaner who takes the work seriously has often already sorted it – and if so, ask to see the original rather than take it on trust.
Keep your expectations honest, all the same. A Basic check confirms that someone had no unspent convictions on the day it was issued. It says nothing about whether they will turn up on time, handle your grandmother’s china with any care, or so much as notice the skirting boards. It is a floor, not a full portrait of a person. Plenty of superb, wholly trustworthy cleaners right across London have never held anything beyond a Basic check, because their work never legally called for more.
The point of understanding any of this is not to turn a simple hiring decision into a background investigation with a corkboard and red string. It is so that the next time you see “DBS checked” glowing on a website in Ealing or Islington or wherever you happen to live, you know exactly what to ask next. And you can tell, fairly quickly, the difference between a company that means it and one that is quietly hoping you won’t push.