Crime and Security Bill

No, the hon. Gentleman will find that over those three and a half years, I was relatively successful in that way, and terrorism and immigration took up the lion's share of my time. It must be right and proper that legislation and revisions to legislation are debated in the Chamber, rather than dealt with up in the Committee corridor by statutory instrument, or simply by review. That takes me neatly on to the issue of DNA. Everybody must agree at the very least that it is right to put the DNA database—and some of the elements around it, which have been much discussed—on a statutory footing, rather than as part of code B, C or D of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which was a wonderful piece of legislation by the way. Given the importance and sensitivity of the DNA database, putting it on a proper statutory footing must be right. The Government are to be commended for that. I do not accept, and never have done, the premise that somehow the national DNA database is an adjunct of the police national computer. It is not, and was never meant to be, a database of the convicted or of those who will be convicted. That has never been its purpose since it came into existence in 2001. It is a device, a tool and an adaptation of science for our use today, and it is no more than that. The suggestion by some, although not all, that DNA is what the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) called a golden bullet that is sufficient to make a jury convict on that sole basis just is not the case. Rarely, if ever, is someone convicted on DNA evidence alone. At best, it is an analytical device, a locational device and a corroborative device. In some cases, all that it has done is hastened the conviction of an individual who was in the frame already, with spectacular success. People will know the examples of those arrested for relatively minor offences, such as affray or car theft, who had their DNA taken—some hon. Members have suggested that it should be removed from the database if no conviction occurs—and it later put them in the frame for a more serious offence. DNA does not of itself lead to a conviction—it does not hang the person, if I may put it like that—but it puts them in the location of the crime or adds to the jigsaw of evidence that is available. It is confirmatory, corroborative and locational, but it is never enough alone to lock people away. We need to take that aspect of DNA seriously. I do not agree that retention is antithetical to civil liberties. I got into trouble on the "Today" programme when the report came out recommending a national database. I told John Humphrys—I think that was the interviewer—that I had some sympathy with the report's logic. I have learned my lesson since, because for the next two or three days that ran in the papers as "Government edging towards national database". I was not saying that at all. However, there is a great distance between saying that we should retain the DNA only of those convicted and saying that we should have a national database. Wherever the line is drawn, it will be arbitrary. The ECHR case on article 8 was probably right in one regard—that it was the blanket and indiscriminate nature of retention that was the difficulty. I firmly believe that the Government have gone far enough to show that the criteria for retention are no longer blanket or indiscriminate. However, the position should be kept under constant review, because things change—not least the technology involved in DNA. In some recent cases involving low copy number DNA, it would not have been possible to extract the DNA five or 10 years ago. But the criteria are definitely not a proxy for saying "We will keep the DNA of the guilty or those who are likely to be guilty one day." The database is purely an analytical device for the police. Whatever the algorithms, logarithms or other things that scientists and occasionally GeneWatch can throw up about the probability of solving cases, they do not change the fact that there are significant serious crimes—cold-case and more recent crimes—that have been dealt with through DNA. We will be profoundly worse off, in terms of the overall liberties of our people and the efficacy of the criminal justice system, if we lose the DNA database or went where the hon. Member for Eastleigh wants to go. It is not the case that, as the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) said, some degree of criminality is a precursor or a useful factor—I am not sure whether it is an exogenous or endogenous factor—in determining who will commit crime later on. Would that it were that simple. In many low-level cases, that may be so—we could all name the 10 or 12 individuals in our areas who cause a lot of the low-level difficulties—but he was profoundly wrong to say, "Keep the convicted on, because that then is the body of subsequent criminality." He said it far more eloquently, but that was the gist of it. In one specific case the right hon. Gentleman was absolutely wrong. There are no predictive qualities in people's behaviour, criminal or otherwise, for murder—absolutely none. He might be right in the case of breaking and entering, burglary or certain other serious crimes, including some violent crimes, but he is not right in the case of murder. We know that, overwhelmingly, murderers have never committed crimes before—some have, of course, but overwhelmingly they have not. If there is some chance, on a cold-case basis or otherwise, of giving people final closure on some of those outrageous cases involving violent crime, rape and murder, then, in the balance of things, it is worth paying that price collectively as a society. I understand the Liberals' position—it has always been their position—but it is a real shame that the Opposition have chosen to use their opposition to those provisions as a fig leaf for not voting for the Bill this evening. I hope that the hon. Member for Hornchurch (James Brokenshire) will give us more reasons for their not doing so than were given at the start of this debate by his hon. Friend—I suppose he might be right hon.—the shadow Home Secretary, who, for me, only showed clearly why, if tragedy happens and his side ever gets in, he should not be Home Secretary for long. I hope that that is the case for the sake of the country, because he is clearly not up to it, and he showed that again tonight. I have a couple of other points to make. It takes too long for good ideas in government to come to fruition. I absolutely welcome the tail-end elements in the Bill on stop and search, which are rooted in what Flanagan said some 18 months ago. Everyone will remember Ronnie's point about "good cholesterol" and "bad cholesterol", which was a very good one. I do not accept the premise, parlayed about by someone on our side fairly recently, that somehow the only difference between good police forces and bad police forces on clear-up rates is not bureaucracy but the fact that some officers on some forces would rather stay in the canteen. For an ex-Home Secretary to say that was quite shocking, I thought. I know all 43 forces in this country intimately, and I do not know of any force in which people would rather stay in the canteen than be out on the streets doing their job. The Police Federation and the Association of Chief Police Officers have sometimes—indeed, consistently—overplayed their hands on bureaucracy. Much has been done to get rid of bureaucracy, by previous Governments and certainly by this one. What Ronnie meant by "good cholesterol" and "bad cholesterol" was that, because of democratic accountability and the rights of the individual and for a host of other reasons, some of that "good cholesterol" bureaucracy is essential for fairness, the defence of liberty and the rights that the hon. Member for Eastleigh mentioned. However, even with all the advances that we have made on bureaucracy, I would not say that we had gone far enough. We always need to go further, not least because, rather like the law and society, policing does not stand still. The policing world was profoundly different two and a half years after I was the Minister responsible for policing from the policing world two and a half years before, so Lord knows what the rate of change was five or 10 years ago. We need to keep abreast of that, which is why the work that we have already done on stop and account and the work that will come out of the Bill on stop and search are all positive developments. However, I would say—someone raised this earlier—that there is no need for a review of section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 in the Bill in quite the terms suggested, because that is already being done. I said to the Metropolitan police time and again—happily, the Metropolitan Police Authority, the service and the commissioner all agree—that it cannot be right as we proceed beyond 2005 that all of London is still signed off every month as a section 44 area. Whether they have done this yet or not I do not know, but the sooner we create specific permanent section 44 areas—