GOVERNMENT staff at the Criminal Records Bureau in Darwen could be asked to take jobs elsewhere after a shake-up of the way the office is run.

The bureau, in India Mill, was opened in 2002 to help ease the burden on the Liverpool head office, which deals with thousands of background checks. The office is also a 'disaster recovery site,' able to take over from Liverpool in the event of an emergency, from floods to a bomb.

The Home Office and Capita jointly run the Criminal Records Bureau, which was due to have around 200 staff when it first opened. Now the Home Office-employed workers could be reduced to a skeleton staff.

A spokesman for the Home Office said: "We are looking very carefully at a range of options because we are proposing that all future activities should be concentrated in Liverpool. While we are keeping the need for a permanent site, and Darwen will continue to be an emergency site, we are looking at possibly winding down some of the operations there." The shake-up would only affect the 22 permanent Home Office staff, and not the Capita employees at India Mill. A 30-day consultation with the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) is now taking place.

The Home Office spokesman said: "Staff were told about this on Friday 13th. Staff will have an option to move to Liverpool on a voluntary basis, and we are talking to other Government departments. There are other jobs we can find for them.

"We are being open and honest about it. One of those options is that we concentrate our activities in Liverpool rather than a little bit in Darwen. We have a consultation process with the trades unions so it isn't a simple way of closing it.

"The actual Darwen office would continue to be a disaster recovery office. At the moment it has 22 permanent staff and a few contract staff. One of the proposals is that we wind that down to a skeleton staff. So if we do need to, we can flick a switch, bus staff over there and get it up and running."

A spokesman for the PCS union was unable to comment at this stage.