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Protection of Freedoms Bill

I rise to speak as someone who was a member of the Committee scrutinising the Bill. It is the first Bill that I have followed through from beginning to end and the experience has been, in equal measure, a joy, an insight, and, at times, a disappointment. Starting with DNA, there has been a lot of talk about the need to balance the rights of victims and the civil liberties of the public, but there has not been a lot of balanced rhetoric in those discussions. Nobody doubts that DNA is a crucial investigatory tool for the police, but it is just one of the tools at their discretion. One of the pieces of evidence given to the Home Affairs Committee when it looked into the issue was that an average of 0.67% of convictions rely on DNA evidence. It is important to remember that when the Opposition cite endless cases in which they say that otherwise people would not have been brought to book.