Home Affairs and Justice

Yes, it could have been the time taken to count the votes, although I sort of doubt it. Where are we now? As it stands, the law is that police guidelines allow deletion only in exceptional circumstances. As far as I can see, the first applications for deletion receive mandatory, compulsory refusal. That has given us the biggest database in the world. The numbers are astounding—4.2 million people, of whom 1 million are innocent.; that is 7 per cent. of our population. The nearest comparator is Austria, with a figure of 1 per cent., which gives a clear idea of how heavy-handed we are on this issue. The Government had intended the numbers to match those on the national fingerprint database—that is, 7.3 million—and had they carried on, they would have got there by 2012. The interesting point is that I think that the Government are deceiving themselves, rather than setting out to deceive us. The Prime Minister said that 114 murders had been resolved on the back of the database. When we asked for one example—I have asked several times—the Government have never been able to provide it, as a statistical analysis is involved. It is based on a series of errors. I will not take the House through the whole GeneWatch analysis, but suffice it to say that not every DNA sample found in a location even shows that a person was there; these days, such samples can be transferred by other people as a result of handshakes, sweat being carried across and so on. Secondly, if the person was at the location, they will not necessarily be the criminal. Thirdly, even if they are the criminal, they will not necessarily be convicted on the basis of the data, for other reasons. There has been a massive overestimate of the importance of such samples. The hon. Member for Eastleigh made a very important point when he said that the Government have casually gone along sweeping up the 1 million innocent people while ignoring the couple of million guilty people from pre-2001. Actually, I should say to the hon. Gentleman that I think that the date was a little earlier than that; some people were in prison at the time and there is an overlap. Nevertheless, the people essentially from pre-2001 have been ignored. I urge the Government to consider the example of Scotland, which has a better system and a better outcome in terms of criminal convictions. The issue should not be a dividing line across the House; we should be able to arrive at a practical solution that protects the privacy of individuals—most particularly, the 100,000 innocent children who should not be on the database—but gives the police the ammunition and mechanisms that they need to carry things through. The issue worries me in one other respect. I do not mean this in any pejorative way, but in the past few years the Government have been a little naive about their use of technology. Whether in respect of databases, DNA or surveillance, they have put an awful lot of weight on technology. The problem is that although a large number of people think that DNA technology is absolutely infallible, even a cursory look at low copy number techniques shows that it is anything but that. However, put in front of a jury, the technology has a power much greater than it deserves. I do not want us to build an anti-crime or anti-terrorism strategy on that technology-plus-database approach. I will finish by saying that many of these issues will not necessarily be for dispute unless the Government want to pick a fight yet again. As they know, we are always happy to give them the fight, but the raw truth is that there is a way through that should be to the advantage of our country, without any of us having to have a serious dispute over it.