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Counter-Terrorism Bill

I am worried that the more the Minister seeks to reassure us the less reassured I feel. He said that now is not the moment to debate this issue; that the Bill is not the right place to make a stand on it. I completely disagree. Clause 10 will allow a constable to take a person’s fingerprints without the appropriate consent if the person is subject to a control order. If you are subject to a control order, you have not even been through a process of law; you have not been through a criminal process. This widens out incredibly the ability of the police to take these samples and now is the point to make a stand. If the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Harris, want a national database to make it entirely fair, that would be a completely different argument. The Minister said that having these samples on a database has helped to solve many crimes, but that is a completely different argument. We are talking here about people who have not even been through a process of law. We have three tiers of people at the moment: those who have been convicted and are on the database—and no one is arguing against that; those who have been picked up under the terrorism Acts and who are subject to a control order, or who have volunteered their DNA, who will stay on the database because no chief constable will remove them unless they write to him 20 times, and even then he probably will not; and those who are lucky enough not to be on a DNA database but among whom there may be many criminals. It is not a logical position and I am surprised that the Minister does not feel that this is the point to have the fight about it.