Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (Amendment: Qualifying Offences) Order 2013

My Lords, the noble Lord will know that the policy to delete the DNA records of innocent people is something that has been widely welcomed around the House and, indeed, by the Opposition. That work has been going on. It has created a gap which the noble Lord has pointed to; I have to acknowledge that. However, the Government and the police, in considering the management of the issue, have come jointly to the conclusion that there would be no retrospective applications to the Biometrics Commissioner. That is because to have done so would have required police scrutiny of the case file of every innocent person arrested for a qualified offence in the past three years. That is reckoned to be 180,000 case files. This was considered disproportionate to the circumstances which the new legislation is designed to address because, according to our knowledge of those files, it would only have identified a very small number of cases suitable for application to the Biometrics Commissioner. It would have significantly delayed the entire programme to delete innocent people from the databases. I do not think that the Government are seeking to make an apology for that decision, because we consider that Parliament’s wish was that the DNA of innocent people should indeed be deleted from the database.