Coroners and Justice Bill

I am grateful to the Minister, and I do not want to be churlish. We had a vote and the clause stood part of the Bill when we came out of Committee, and we felt that we had to vote against it at the time. We are delighted that we helped win the argument and feel vindicated, and we should not be churlish. However, our relief and joy is coloured and tinged by our ongoing and grave concerns about the Government's record and policy on data. I mentioned earlier the Government's appalling record on storing and handling data. We are concerned not only by the Government's incompetence; of far greater concern are the fundamental flaws in their entire data policy. Only today we heard reports that ContactPoint, the Government's child protection database, is in disarray. It was designed to help protect Britain's 11 million children, but its launch has been delayed again after local authorities discovered loopholes in the system that was to hide the details of the most vulnerable young people in this country. ContactPoint has been described as almost entirely illegal by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, and a spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said that it was working to resolve the problem. You couldn't write the script, and it gets worse. A recent report by Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge, concluded that at least 11 of the Government's databases could be illegal. He went on to point out that the Government are spending a staggering £16 billion a year on data gathering and plan to spend another £105 billion on it in the next five years. Furthermore, almost every one of those database projects has signally failed to remain on budget. In 2002, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair launched Connecting for Health, a massive £6.2 billion database for medical records; since then, the costs have more than doubled to £12.7 billion, two of the four contractors have pulled out and the launch has been put back to 2015. At the time, the then PM said:""If I live in Bradford and fall ill in Birmingham, I want the NHS to be able to treat me"." However, as Ross Clark, author of "The Road to Southend Pier: One man's struggle against the surveillance society" said, thank goodness Mr. Blair did not fall ill in Stafford. As the Healthcare Commission made clear in its report, it was the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust's obsession with targets and data that critically undermined clinical judgment and the treatment of patients. The problem is that time and again the Government's default position when faced with a crisis is to announce yet more databases and more infringements on our civil liberties. There is no doubt that there is a serious terrorist threat in this country, but the Government's response to the 7 July bombings was to announce that they would bring in an ID register—never mind that none of the bombers had ever tried to hide their identities. We obviously have serious problems with crime being out of control, and the Government have to do their best to combat it, but they are going to expand the national DNA database even though the overwhelming majority of crimes are committed by a small proportion of the population who are already on the DNA database. Only yesterday morning, the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. Member for North Swindon (Mr. Wills), was opining in an extraordinary manner on the Sean Hodgson case. He pointed out that Mr. Hodgson would never have been released or won his freedom if it were not for DNA testing and databases. Of course Mr. Hodgson was released only because of DNA testing, but that had absolutely nothing to do with DNA databases; all that was needed was one DNA sample from him that did not match any of the key exhibits. The right hon. Gentleman was getting completely carried away. The problem is that when it comes to a crisis, the Government's default position is to react in the only way they know: to announce yet further extensions of databases. I should like to quote from the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, who was referring to the proposed communication database when he said:""We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom's back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security state."" Of course we welcome the Government's withdrawal of clause 154. However, as I mentioned, our joy is tempered and coloured by that appalling catalogue of failings. We need not only a cultural change, but a fundamental change of Government. We welcome what the Government have done, but there is still a long way to go.