4. Mr. Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD): What her latest estimate is of the number of people without criminal convictions whose records are stored on the national DNA database.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Alan Campbell): There are about 857,000 people on the national DNA database who do not have a current criminal record on the police national computer, but that figure includes those who have been convicted and had their records deleted and those for whom proceedings are still ongoing, as well as those who have never been convicted.
Read that figure again: 857,000 people without criminal convictions have their DNA recorded on the Home Office database.
Many, perhaps most, of them are wholly innocent of any offence, such as my colleague, Greg Hands, MP for Hammersmith and Fulham, who supplied a sample simply to eliminate him from an inquiry into the murder of his uncle. He has asked for it to be destroyed, but the police and Home Office refuse.
The excuse is, of course, that DNA analysis techniques have led to increased crime detection; and so they have. But in a free society, a balance should always be struck between the freedom of the individual and the security of the state. In the present instance, the scales are tilted too heavily against the citizen.
The DNA database procedure is wrong. It should be revisited.
It is at least gratifying to know that not all honourable members are content to see this nonsense pass. Well said indeed.
The huge expansion of the DNA database to include innocent people and those cleared by the courts of any wrongdoing is extremely worrying.
The database should be confined to those convicted of a range of offences considered to be serious enough to warrant inclusion on the database.
This should be overseen by an independant body and the deletion of a person’s DNA record (and fingerprints) not left to the sole discretion of chief constables.
Peter Bolton