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National DNA Database

I would be glad to do so. I am pleased to hear that the Select Committee is going to take that action. In July, the mother of the two girls got a letter from Detective Inspector Tracy Sherman of the Met. It simply rehearsed the legal position under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, saying that the police had the power to do what they did:""In this case the arrest was lawful and therefore the power to take and retain DNA exists."" In other words, "We can do it legally, we are doing it and there's nothing you can do about it." That was the police position. The onus is on an innocent 14-year-old girl to show that the circumstances merit removal. Since then, the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), who was also involved with the family, has written to the Metropolitan police. Earlier this year, I met Gary Pugh, the director of forensic services at the Met, to raise the case again. He wrote to me to say that, in the end, the two girls' DNA was removed from the database in 2008. It took two years and two MPs. The police tried to hide behind Ministers, and Ministers tried to hide behind chief constables. It was a thoroughly unedifying incident, and it is one of the things that drew me into the issue. Most importantly, in December 2008, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against the indefinite retention on the database of the DNA of people who have not been convicted of a crime. I will quote some of what the Court said, because it is important. The Court said that it was""struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature of the power of retention in England and Wales"," that the retention of the DNA in question""fails to strike a fair balance between the competing public and private interests"" and that the UK Government had""overstepped any acceptable margin of appreciation in this regard"." The Court further ruled that""the retention at issue constitutes a disproportionate interference with the applicants' right to respect for private life and cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society."" Even if some Home Office Ministers are anti-European, one might expect that such a ruling would bring a blush to their cheeks. Not at all. They waited five months before consulting on their proposals. When they went out to consultation, they got 503 responses from lawyers, police organisations, children's rights groups and so on. It is interesting that their proposals after consultation are almost exactly the same as the proposals that they put out to consultation in the first place. In other words, Members will be shocked to hear, they took no notice of the consultation. That is rare and unusual where Governments are concerned, so I do not want to shock younger Members unduly. The Home Secretary's written statement in November setting out the finalised Home Office plans in response to the ECHR ruling took into account none of the opinions in the consultation. I will not go through the Government's plans, but I will make one point. The original consultation document contained plans to retain the DNA of under-18s who were arrested but not convicted. We have not had any more information, so I would like to hear what will be done about that group of people. In conclusion, I draw Parliament's attention to the views of Sir Alec Jeffreys, the father of DNA. One would expect the father of the science to be in favour of a vast database, of collecting as much DNA from as many people as possible and of the fact that we have the biggest DNA database relative to population in the world. However, he says:""My view is very clear that if you have been convicted of a crime then you owe it to society to be retained on that database for catching in the future should you reoffend. But the retention of entirely innocent people is a whole different issue. There is a sort of presumption here that if they haven't committed any crime now, then they will in the future."" That is this Government's midway point: not quite innocent and not quite guilty.