Protection of Freedoms Bill

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Baroness Doocey

Tuesday 29th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Doocey]

My Lords, the Bill will place a large administrative and financial burden on all police forces. I believe that we need to monitor the impact of this, particularly in the current climate, when police budgets are under threat and facing severe cuts.

Each DNA profile and sample will need to be processed individually to ensure that they are deleted within the correct time parameters. Furthermore, this process must take into account any subsequent reoffending by the individual, as well as an application for extended retention.

The Metropolitan Police estimates that implementing the Bill will entail a one-off cost of £2.5 million, with ongoing costs of nearly half a million pounds a year. That is a huge sum of money when you consider how tight budgets are going to be, and it could pay for 10 police officers per year. Amendment 39 would ensure that the impact on the police service of the retention periods for fingerprints and DNA profiles and, in particular, the estimated costs of processing samples on an individual basis were reported back to Parliament.

An operational risk is also inherent in the complexity of the retention regime. While the Bill will in theory put in place mechanisms to ensure that DNA data are deleted at the right time, no system is perfect. If, as could well occur with the volumes involved, the deletion process were out of sync and not carried out at the appropriate time, DNA profiles which should have been deleted could remain on the database. If these profiles were then to be matched with the DNA from a crime scene or the victim of a serious crime, this evidence could not be used, since by law the profile should not have been there in the first place as it should not have been retained.

That is what happened in two cases, both of which necessitated changes to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. In both, a DNA match was obtained but their profiles should already have been deleted from the DNA database. In the first case, which concerned a rape, the judge refused to admit the evidence and the prosecution was abandoned, and in the other case a conviction for murder was quashed by the Court of Appeal on the grounds that the DNA evidence should not have been admitted. The House of Lords subsequently ruled that it should be left to the discretion of the trial judge as to whether evidence in these circumstances should be admitted. We would not want history to repeat itself.

We therefore need some form of reassurance that we will not be put in the invidious position of perhaps identifying another rapist or a murderer but not being able to use the DNA match in evidence. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Erroll]

Does a case collapse just because one bit of evidence is not quite right? I cannot believe that that one bit of evidence would be the only thing to bring about a conviction, in which case why on earth do we let people off? That seems quite dotty to me, as a lay man, unless the whole thing hinged on that one bit of evidence, in which case there could be some ambiguity about it.