Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, Amendment 117A moves us on to the issue of police retention of photographs, a matter on which I tabled an amendment in Committee. We had a lively debate in Committee. I was encouraged to return to the issue by the noble Lords, Lord Monson and Lord Henley, who reminded us that this is only part of the wider issue of the retention of DNA, and the regime that we need so that innocent individuals do not have all sorts of information, including photographs, retained inappropriately. Since Committee stage in July, the Guardian has this week carried out quite a lot of investigation into the scale of the retention of photographs. We were very surprised. We knew that there was a problem, but we had not realised that the sheer scale was as great as that uncovered by the Guardian. In Committee the Minister gave his main reason for rejecting the amendment. He said: ""We are not convinced that the codes of practice are the appropriate vehicle for governing retention of all photographs taken by the police".—[Official Report, 21/7/09; col. 1574.]" I must ask him again: what is the appropriate vehicle? The PACE codes govern the retention of all evidence collected, of which photographs are one example, so there could be no more appropriate place than the PACE codes. Secondly, there is still the problem that there seems to be no statutory accountability of the three national police units that are responsible for the policing of domestic extremism, as they call it. We would call it the right to protest and demonstrate. The very unfortunate terminology of "domestic extremism" being applied to innocent people who do nothing more than go on a protest is a move that must be strongly resisted. It is only on the basis that they attend protests that such people are photographed. There is a very serious issue here, which is why we have returned to it on Report. I know that the Minister will say that we should wait for Denis O’Connor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, to release his national review of the policing of protests. The Minister would be wrong. We do not need a review to know that the photographs of innocent people—people who are not being charged with any offence—should not be retained. For the Minister to quote the review of the policing tactics at protests is simply a red herring. Nor do we need a review to know that the present situation has got so out of control. Anton Setchell, who is in command of ACPO’s domestic extremism unit, apparently said that people who find themselves on the databases, ""should not worry at all"." However, people are worried. We have had a number of people listed on the so-called "sus" cards who were very worried about being on the cards, and who were very worried that their children had been photographed. There can be no excuse for the retention of these photographs past the point where police know whether they are going to charge anyone or not or whether any crimes have been committed, other than for the purpose of building up a database of innocent people, which begins to smack of a police surveillance state, of which we are all very wary. I hope that the Minister will have found it in his heart to agree that this amendment has merit. I beg to move.