Crime and Security Bill

That does not matter—I am past it. The simple truth, therefore, is that I do not believe that the Home Secretary is making an evil, point-scoring, electoral point. I presume that he and other Ministers believe in this approach. The Minister for Policing, Crime and Counter-Terrorism, who will serve on the Committee, is a capable man, and I think that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Tynemouth (Mr. Campbell), is too, so where does it come from? I cannot remember whether Disraeli or Mark Twain originated the phrase "lies, damn lies and statistics", but heavens above it applies here, because the conflation of statistics and so-called facts that has taken place throughout this debate has been astonishing, which was why the quote from the leading statistician cited by the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) was apposite. That was why I asked the Home Secretary earlier to do something that the Home Office has refused to do for the past year. He agreed and we will hold him to it. I asked him to comment on the Prime Minister's claim that 114 murderers have been convicted and locked up as a result of the 1 million database entries from innocent people—not the others, because we all accept that there is a reason for the guilty to be on the database—and to provide the list. The information is in the public domain, so there is no reason why the entire list of 114 murderers should not be published. However, I believe that that assertion is simply untrue. In the words of GeneWatch, the independent experts:""These claims are demonstrably false"." It also describes the claims as ridiculous, and says that it does not believe that locking up our children will protect us in the future. Both Opposition Front-Bench spokesmen and the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee have made the same point. The key period is between 2004 and now. In 2001, there was the first change to the law to allow retention after charge, while the second change, which made the big difference, happened in 2004, with retention allowed after arrest. Between 2004 and now, the size of the database has doubled and become the biggest in the world. Of course, however, the number of direct DNA convictions went down by about 2,000—from around 21,000 to 19,000. The number was about that order of magnitude, but it certainly did not go up. The Home Secretary responds to that by saying that it has happened because crime has gone down. He is the only person in the entire country who believes that crime is going down, but let us take him at his word. However, even if that is the case, crime has gone down on the Government's figures—rigged as they are—by about 10 per cent., but although the database has doubled in size, the proportion of convictions achieved through it has stayed between 0.34 and 0.37 per cent. There is no upward trend—the figures go up and down—and it has remained the case that roughly one in 250 cases have been solved through DNA. The database inflation has not delivered more justice and security; it has simply delivered huge insecurity to the people who are on it, but should not be. Why has this happened? What has led Ministers to take such an approach? They do so not for ill intent. I suspect that my namesake, my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), supports them, and he does not have ill intent at all—there is not a malicious bone in his body. I think that their belief largely results from a misconception of the way in which the system works. Very few hon. Members have served in uniform of any sort, let alone police uniform, and they do not really think this through. They form a lot of their impressions of everything from terrorism to crime by watching too many editions of "Spooks" and "CSI".