Crime and Security Bill

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The information ought to be available. When the Home Secretary and Ministers come before our Committee, as they have done whenever we have asked, they have been absolutely transparent and provided huge amounts of information, but the right hon. Gentleman is right to say that that information should be made available in the first place. We will hear from the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham. We will also hear from a gentleman from Oxford whose DNA was taken after he simply threw a bottle of water up to a protester in a tree in order to give him refreshment. His DNA was taken as a result, and he has been unable to get it removed from the database. The Home Secretary is right: he knows that there is a problem with the current system. If there were a transparent, easy-to-understand system for applying for and getting a reply on DNA retention, people would probably be satisfied, but he has not gone far enough. That is why I am attracted by the evidence given by Chief Constable Peter Neyroud of the National Policing Improvement Agency, which was set up by this Government to be—it is a perfect function for the agency—a central authority to examine applications consistently, so that the balance is right, as the shadow Home Secretary said, and it is not just a question of what a local chief constable says. What is interesting about what the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) just said is that the chief constable of the West Midlands police—I do not know whether anyone spotted this—kept referring in his evidence to the database held by each chief constable as "theirs", as though it belonged to them. Quite frankly, it does not, in my view. The best way to make things consistent is to have one authority to handle them.