“You couldn’t ask for a better alignment,” says Jeff James, as we discuss his old job at The National Archives, his new one at the Disclosure and Barring Service, and the PhD he finished 18 months ago.
In 2016, James, the then-chief executive of The National Archives, began a PhD in sociology and history focused on 19th-century crime and poverty, and specifically how vulnerable children and adults were treated in workhouses through the lens of punishment. During his research, he was able to make use of his easy access to The National Archives. His studies also inspired his next job move.
“I spent seven-and-a-half years thinking quite hard about issues like abuse and neglect, and power and control, and how officials and institutions in the 19th century had an impact on paupers and vulnerable people,” James says. “I immediately recognised in DBS that it was the logical extension of that historical interest, applied to a modern day setting.”
This, he says, was one of the main reasons why DBS “was such an attractive position for me”. He also notes that some of those themes “play through” into the current era. James says an example of this is the popular misconception that vulnerable paupers “were somehow docile and compliant” and “incapable of resisting, never mind influencing, the way that they were treated or mistreated.
“During my research I came across countless examples of extraordinary and determined agency by those that society often thought of as being without worth,” he says. James says this included a young single mother who “absconded over the workhouse walls with a bowl of sour gruel infested with insects that had made dozens of people, including children, ill” and who “demanded that local officials taste the contaminated food that they said their pigs would not eat”.
“The concept and practice of agency, begrudgingly tolerated in the 19th century, is now echoed in modern safeguarding thinking around empowerment, protection and partnership where individuals are supported to make their own decisions, give informed consent, have support and representation where needed and where local solutions are delivered with and through their communities,” he adds.
James joined DBS as its chief executive in June after 10 years as boss of The National Archives. Prior to this, he began his career with a 14 year-spell in the Royal Navy.
These long stints strike a contrast to the high rates of churn seen among senior civil servants. What made him stick around in those roles?
“I guess I’ve always looked for a combination of intellectual and emotional engagement,” James says. “If you look at my career history, my roles have tended to be in organisations where there’s a really strong purpose. But it’s also been something that I emotionally engage with, something that I felt was important, that gave me satisfaction. And DBS is exactly the same.” He notes its “really strong commitment to safeguarding, to protecting vulnerable people”, alongside “massive digital and technology transformation opportunities.
“So they’re the common threads, I suppose, if you look back over my career. I felt like there was a real social purpose to what I was doing. It wasn’t just an operational and efficiency thing. It was also about providing a societal benefit.”
Growing up in the north-east of England, James says it was common for people from that area to join the armed forces. Indeed, it’s a path taken by many in his family. James himself joined the navy in 1984, aged 16, as an apprentice artificer – an electronic engineering role (“it’s fantastic to see apprenticeships back in popularity; it’s one of those things that I thought perhaps had had its day,” he says). Specialising as a submariner, he first worked on Polaris submarines and later on Trident submarines, and says it was “an interesting time… and a very different time”.
“I sometimes look back and it feels like a different life,” he says. “As you would expect, I can’t really talk that much about it given the nature of what I did, but it was a hugely enjoyable period.”
Leaving the navy in 1998, aged 30 – “just at the point where people were recruiting for Y2K” – James says he had built up a broad skill set that meant that he could choose between a range of fields from project management, to engineering, to IT. He went with the latter, working at the University of Leeds in an IT role for six years. He returned to the public sector in 2004, joining the British Library, where he led its document supply service in Boston Spa, and went on to become head of operations for the south. He then joined The National Archives in 2007, initially as head of advice and records knowledge before being promoted to director of public services and then director of operations. He became chief executive in 2014.
James has fond memories of his 16 years at TNA. “It was a really interesting place. It was incredibly varied. I got to engage directly with some of the most iconic documentary heritage of our nation. So Domesday, two versions of the Magna Carta, Guy Fawkes’s confession. Probably one of the most privileged things was doing an exhibition in 2016 for the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare. We had to conserve the will, and it was fascinating to see the expert conservationists who spent about six months carrying out repairs and making sure that the will was in a good physical condition to be displayed.”
James recalls regularly switching between “hats” and every day being different, which made the job “really fascinating”. Not least after the emergence of Covid, he recalls, when “physical access was removed overnight” and DBS “had to suddenly pivot what we were doing and accelerate some of our digital work to make sure that people could still engage with things like family history, which they tended to do even more during the pandemic”.
James says it was also “really humbling” to see how people interacted with documentary heritage.
“The emotions that came through. Not just with the iconic records, but with personal records as well. When somebody was looking for the army service record of their grandfather and you could see the emotional impact of it… that was incredibly moving, and it happened on a regular basis.”
James held a long list of simultaneous job titles as the top civil servant at The National Archives, including chief exec, keeper, controller of Her Majesty’s (and then His Majesty’s) Stationery Office, historical manuscripts commissioner, and Queen’s (then King’s) printer for acts of parliament.
Is it easier having just the one now? “It’s simpler, that’s for sure. I think I had seven titles at one point, and that’s actually to do with the way that the archives came together as an organisation. It was constituted from several different bodies, so lots of different functions were brought together under one umbrella organisation. DBS is no less fascinating, but it has a comparatively more straightforward structure. I’m enjoying just having the one title now, and one thing to focus on.”
He’s joining DBS at what he calls a “really exciting point in its journey”, due to a programme of tech-based reforms “which will transform the way that we engage with our customers, will allow us to deliver better value for money, higher quality services, and ultimately lead to better safeguarding outcomes”. This will include piloting AI-driven enhancements such as refining its police matching algorithm to decrease unnecessary police referrals.
These and other planned technological improvements over the next few years will help DBS to serve what James sees as its dual function: “[DBS] sits at this crux between making sure that people who shouldn’t be working with vulnerable adults and children aren’t, but at the same time helping employers to make good decisions that allow them to have confidence in the workforce. And as that workforce changes, we need to be able to adapt to it,” he says.
James describes DBS as being “in a really good place” due to the significant change that his predecessor oversaw in the previous five years. “But equally,” he says, “there are massive opportunities for the future in thinking about how we can make our services more accessible, make sure they are aligned with the needs of employers, make sure they are robust and good quality, and that we’re making really good data and evidence-led decisions that are fair and transparent and open.” A key part of this will be designing services in a more user-centric way “so that we can be confident that what we do in the future is going to meet the needs of our customers,” he adds.
In April, the government launched a review of arm’s-length bodies, with a presumption that all quangos will be scrapped unless there is a compelling reason for them to remain independent. Has James been asked to make the case for keeping DBS as a separate entity – and is he confident it will stay as it is?
“Well, whatever happens with us in the future, our main purpose remains supporting the government to make good safeguarding decisions,” he says. “So as long as the services and products that we provide are delivered, it doesn’t really matter where they happen. We’ve got a very strong purpose, a very strong mission, and we’ve got bold ambitions for the future. The environment may change around us, but that doesn’t really detract us from our core purpose.”
In the introduction to DBS’s 2025-28 strategy, published just a few weeks before James took over in June, his predecessor Eric Robinson mentioned planned changes, including “the internal reshaping of our operations teams”.
James says this is happening because DBS, like The National Archives, was formed from multiple entities – in DBS’s case, the 2012 merger of the Independent Safeguarding Authority and the Criminal Records Bureau – “and some of the ways that we had previously been operating were still segmented, in terms of disclosure and barring.
“Over the last year or so, we’ve brought those functions together,” he says. “So the functions that were traditionally in Darlington and in Liverpool in the barring and disclosure services have now been brought together into an operational services directorate, which has got almost 1,000 staff in it who are multi-skilled and who are keen to develop themselves in a more flexible way of working.”
At the National Archives, a non-ministerial department, James and his colleagues were civil servants. But at DBS, they are public servants in a non-departmental public body, which means they are not held to the government’s 60% office-attendance mandate. “We’re not subject to the usual civil service constraints, but obviously we do align ourselves with that general pattern of work where there’s a combination of people who are in the office, some people who work remotely, some people who work in a hybrid kind of way,” James says.
He cites numerous benefits of this approach: “Our staff engagement is very high, our productivity is very high, and it allows us to deliver better value for money as well, because we’re gradually reducing our physical footprint in order to deliver our services more efficiently. And we get the benefit of being able to engage with a talent pool which is not geographically constrained. We’re able to look for the best people across the country.”
James says investing in technology has been key to enabling this flexibility, and that he believes more is needed “to really double down on the advantages”. He says his customer services team, which had previously been limited to an office environment, can now be based either in the office or at home, or some combination of the two. There is a method to this flexible model: when staff are new and being trained, there is a more fixed approach of office-based working so they can be appropriately supported. Once they gain confidence and familiarity with the technology, it becomes more fluid.
Does he think DBS has got the right balance?
“I don’t think you ever get there,” he says. “It’s an evolutionary thing, isn’t it? You’re constantly evolving as you’re using technology and developing your working practices, and thinking about how you can provide a work context in which the individuals themselves benefit at the same time as the customers and at the same time as the people who pay for the services that you provide.”
What does James do when he’s not running a complex, vital and constantly evolving institution? Based in Liverpool, he says he likes to unwind by going for a run along the river – but he’s a dad of three sons, 11-year-old twins and a 13-year-old, “and they’re all football mad”.
So he spends most of his spare time “on touchlines in wet, miserable weather supporting them in their various football matches. Because that’s what you do, isn’t it? As a parent. So if I’m not running, I’m probably supporting grassroots football”.
The night before our interview, though, it was professional football. We’re speaking the day after the Lionesses won their second Euros on the trot, and both interviewer and interviewee are in good spirits.
“It was very peculiar because my wife missed the Sweden game and I had to tell her, you know, you wouldn’t believe this game, this amazing game that you missed. I said it’s been 14 penalties and we won, but we only scored three.
“So when we got to penalties last night, she was feeling quite downbeat and I was like, ‘no, no, it’ll be fine. This is our tournament. I just feel confident that we’re going to get through.’ So [there was] a massive cheer from our household last night when they won. Fantastic achievement! Absolutely brilliant.”