Crime and Security Bill

I commend the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Mr. McCartney) on his speech; he clearly put a lot of passion, time, energy and work into delivering this change for his constituents and others. However, he should not take opposition to elements of the Bill as tactics. The House is big enough not to deliver justice for some at the price of injustice for others. I was serving on the Front Bench when the issue first came up, and I do not pretend that it was easy to resolve in our minds. After all, it involves balancing an incredibly powerful anti-crime tool—one that will deliver convictions to deal with criminals, which is what we want—against the imposition of a presumption of guilt, perhaps a lifetime presumption in some respects, to people who are seen as innocent by the state and who are, in most cases, innocent. There will, of course, be exceptions when the judicial system fails, but mostly such people will be innocent. I shall give some examples in a moment. I do not pretend that the issue is easy. Some of the Government's proposals on the DNA database are very welcome. When we considered this before, Conservative Members, and I think the Liberals too, took the view that one way of improving the effectiveness of the scheme was to bring in the 2 million extra guilty people who had been overlooked by the original legislation. It was, frankly, governmental or corporate laziness to go for the ones that it was easy to take the samples from, not those who were likely to be committing crimes today and in future—namely, those who were convicted before the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 went through, let alone the Criminal Justice Act 2003. I approve of that. It impinges only on guilty people, and it will greatly improve conviction rates for cold cases, for current cases, and for future cases. Two million guilty people will have committed many more crimes than 1 million innocent people, virtually by definition. That is why we came to the conclusion that the Scottish system was the best compromise. I know that we differ with the Liberals on this, although it was their brothers and sisters in Scotland who put that system through; indeed, I think it was a Liberal justice spokesman who did it. I understand, however, that the compromise was, as the Home Secretary said, based on "no data at the time", not "no data today", because the Scottish Government have had the sense—I am not often heard speaking well of an Scottish National party Government —to review the policy, as did the Labour-Liberal Government before them. Their review showed that the outcome in Scotland was at least as good as, if not better than, that achieved under the system that we have in England and Wales, despite the Home Secretary's new statistics; I shall talk about the presentation of new evidence at the Dispatch Box in a moment. There will be those in the House who think, "My constituents worry about being hurt, murdered, assaulted or burgled. They're not worried about these technical, civil libertarian concerns." I should therefore like to take a moment or two to explain how this is, in practical terms, very real to those who suffer in this way. The case that I am going to cite is in the public domain, on the BBC website; I will summarise so that people can check the extended details themselves. The man involved is called David Sweeney. He says that in 2004 he was on his way home and was assaulted by two other men. He was about 28 years old at the time of writing, and he is a white and—I think, from the language he uses—middle-class male. That is an important point to remember: he was a white, probably middle-class male. In the course of what happened following that attack, he was arrested on a charge of affray, which was then dropped because it was clear that he was not at fault. He was not the aggressor—he was simply defending himself, and those two men were guilty of attacking him. So far, so good—an unpleasant incident, but it was over. Then, two months ago—I take up the story in his words:""I dropped a friend off at Manchester Airport and double parked. A foolish mistake and on returning to my car the police had arrived and given me a ticket. They asked if I was 'known to the police' and I said no, having no criminal record. I was already apologetic and admitted my mistake and had accepted the parking fine.""But when they then heard over the radio that I was on the DNA database, they treated me with total contempt—as if I were a serious criminal. 'You lied to us', they said. 'You're on the database. So you've obviously done something wrong'"—" an interesting assumption—""'What are you trying to conceal now?'…There was no separation between my DNA records and those of a violent criminal.""This characterises my main problem with the database. Anyone who is on it, I think the police will have an inclination to see them as a criminal. All they heard over the radio was 'he's on the database'. Did they know I had committed no crime? I don't think so."" That case is not unusual. However, we have been talking about other categories of people on the database. The Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee pointed out that 77 per cent. of young black males—defined as 15 to 34-year-olds—are on the database; the Liberal spokesman said that the proportion is just under half, at 30-something per cent. It is one thing if this happens to someone once, and they are angry enough to write to the BBC about it, but what if it happens to them and their friends all the time? What does that do to their presumption of justice? What does it do to their perception of the police? What does it do to their belief in law and order in their community? This is not a theoretical issue, or some namby-pamby, civil liberties piece of high-flown rhetoric: it affects ordinary citizens in our country day by day, and it drives a stake through the presumption of innocence in our society.