The House of Lords has voted in favour of an amendment to the Counter Terrorism Bill, requiring a shift in the policy of data retention. Currently the law is, in the words of its critics, "severely loaded against innocent people being able to ensure that their most sensitive personal details are not kept indefinitely following their exclusion" [from an enquiry].
Baroness Hanham, the sponsor of the amendment, said:
"The guidelines are deeply worrying and make clear just how
high a barrier the Government have imposed on DNA and fingerprint
information ever being destroyed. The initial response to a request
for destruction is an automatic refusal."
The Lords are not the only ones to have recommended that the Government change its current policy of indefinite retention. The Government-appointed Ethics Committee of the National DNA Database (NDNAD) recommended earlier this year that the DNA samples of innocent people should be deleted on conclusion of an investigation, and that their DNA profiles should not be added to the database.
The citizen's enquiry run by the Human Genetics Commission (another Government initative) also recommended, in July this year, that the samples and records of innocent people should not be retained, as you may remember from these blog posts. You might also remember the speech Gordon Brown made to the IPPR back in June, putting a precise figure on how many cases the NDNAD has solved... despite the NDNAD's operators saying that "it is not possible to provide figures for the number of convictions produced by DNA".
All in all, the present policy on DNA retention does not, it must be said, smack of a Government acting on the views of those it has appointed to look into this. In a week when the Home Secretary has published the results of her public consultation into the National Identity Scheme, that is not an encouraging picture... but more of that later.
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