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Coroners and Justice Bill

My amendment deals with the retention of data of a different sort: that of personal photographs. If a citizen attends a public protest or any other kind of public demonstration in a perfectly peaceful capacity and law-abiding way, the police can and often do take your photograph and then retain it—and do so, as far as I understand, indefinitely. The point of my amendment is to discover the rules around this. The amendment would mirror the changes set in motion by the European Court of Human Rights in the Marper case to limit the amount of time that innocent people’s DNA can be kept on a database. I do not believe that photographs of innocent people should be kept on any sort of database either. It is particularly shocking that according to the Guardian, the database on which innocent people’s photographs are kept is called "CRIMINT", which already suggests that they are regarded as criminals. My amendment would alter the PACE code so that photographs cannot be kept for longer than a year unless the subject is subsequently charged and convicted of a crime. A photograph in a record of participation of protests is personal information, and keeping it on file as a record of potential criminal activity, which is the excuse that was given to me when I was photographed in Brighton taking part in a protest outside the local authority; it was in case there was going to be subsequent criminal activity on my part. I imagine, therefore, that I am on this CRIMINT database, so perhaps I should declare an interest in moving this amendment. We need to know about this database. The Answer from the Government that I received on 23 June to my Written Question said: ""There are a number of databases maintained by police forces and policing organisations with the capability of storing images. However, this information is not held centrally".—[Official Report, 23/6/09; col. WA 272.]" That suggests that the Government do not know much about this database or about how many people’s images are retained on databases. They need at least to issue more guidance to the police with regard to these. When Assistant Commissioner Chris Allison was asked on the edition of "Panorama" entitled "Whatever Happened to People Power?" about what happens to the data, particularly the photographs, collected by the forward intelligence teams, his reply was an unspecific, "I don’t know". If you combine the Answer to my Written Question, which is that the Government do not know what images are being kept for the purposes of databasing and profiling, and the assistant commissioner’s reply, that suggests that there is a considerable gap in the care that is being taken with people’s photographs. At the very least, my amendment should engender some debate on this issue, but I may want to come back to it on Report with the view that it should go on to statute, as in this case the PACE codes have a lacuna in them. I beg to move.