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Coroners and Justice Bill

I thank the noble Lords, Lord Monson and Lord Henley, for their support for this amendment, and I thank the Minister for taking it seriously and encouraging me to think further about the matter before Report. I did not base my amendment on the Wood case, although I congratulate Mr Wood on having taken that case. The amendment has arisen from a number of protesters over a length of time who have found it particularly offensive that their photographs are taken and particularly horrific that they are stored on a database. Another example is that of Diana Phillips, who wrote into the Guardian saying that she was photographed with her six and 10 year-old children. She made the point that her children probably had "steadily growing police files", although they had done nothing wrong. I shall bear in mind the Minister’s comments about the fact that PACE is probably not the place in which to try to set something of a statutory framework. The only reason why I chose a year is because that is what it is for in the case of DNA retention. Actually, I agree with the Minister that if you have had your photograph taken and there is no need for it to be kept, it should be destroyed immediately. I take on board what he says about intelligence and terrorism. That is a vastly different issue; undoubtedly, when I check up on the statute surrounding that on intelligence gathering, I will find that it already has a much more satisfactory framework than does photographing innocent people, for which there is no framework whatever at the moment. That is what this short debate has discovered—that the retention of those innocent people’s images should have some limitation and actually does not. We are still no wiser about what the volume is. I should be very grateful if the Minister could try to discover from ACPO what sort of volume of image retention we are dealing with here. We should know whether there is a large-scale problem here or whether it is relatively limited. I look forward to coming back to this issue on Report. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 205A withdrawn.