DNA database data to be held for twice as long as MPs demanded

Posted by Gary Flood on Fri, 12/03/2010 - 16:19
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Using its Commons majority on a whipped vote the government has forced through a ruling that says police can keep genetic information on the National DNA Database for six years – a period the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee had deemed “unacceptable”.

The database is also now a statutory footing following a mid-week debate on the Crime and Security Bill, which is currently at the report stage in the Commons.

Crime and policing minister David Hanson spent the debate rejecting cross-party demands for a retention period of only three years for data from those not subsequently convicted of a crime, though calls for the data to be held for a longer period (as in Scotland) where the suspect was arrested for a serious violent or sexual crime were also deflected.

Retention falls from 12 years to six and in a new clause to the Crime and Security Bill, which has now completed its passage through the Commons, there is provision for a way in “exceptional circumstances” the "innocent" can "request" the destruction of their data, thereby taking this process out of the hands of the chief constables at whose discretion to keep or discard the data the case currently is. But that is widely expected to be applied to just a handful of those wrongly arrested or who volunteered DNA data to eliminate them from a crime.

About a million records on the existing database are from those never convicted, cautioned, formally warned or reprimanded - including 100,000 children – while the database has grown from 2.1 million in 2002 to 5.6 million in 2009.

In the same period the number of detected crimes for which a DNA match was available had fallen from 21,000 to just 18,000.