Serious and Organised Crime: Prüm Convention

Anne-Marie Trevelyan Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)]

It is with a heavy heart that I stand to speak in this debate, as I am one of our Home Secretary’s most ardent supporters. Our nation is lucky indeed to have someone so entirely committed to protecting our citizens and doing all in her power to make our Home Office functions work as effectively as possible. However, I have been more than a little bemused by this proposal that the UK sign up by 31 December 2015 to reciprocal data-sharing of our DNA, fingerprint and vehicle registration databases with EU member states that have already signed up to Prüm.

I was under the impression before I came to the House that we had opted out of all police and criminal justice measures, including the Prüm decisions, agreed before the Lisbon treaty. There was a good deal of noise about this last year when, in the run-up to 1 December 2014, the British Government declared that we would rejoin 35 measures in the national interest—I am led to understand that that number would have been smaller had we not been in coalition—but we did not seek to rejoin Prüm. It seems that the reason for not opening up our databases to fellow EU states was not one of national interest or protection of our citizens’ data from different police jurisdictions, but simply that we would have been fined because we could not have built the computer system in time for the deadline and so would have been at risk of infraction.

I commend that decision on financial prudence grounds, as well as data protection ones, but I am bemused because I remember the Home Secretary saying the European Court of Justice should not have the final say over matters such as criminal law and that Her Majesty’s Government should be able to renegotiate such arrangements as they saw fit. That is why I have been confused. While there is an opportunity, the window for which closes on 31 December, for us to sign up to Prüm, we could just as easily not sign up now to taking us into Prüm under the Lisbon treaty framework, with the attendant risk of putting our most personal biometric data and its management under ECJ jurisdiction. We could instead build our own portal and allow other countries—including those outwith the EU, not just EU countries—to access our DNA and fingerprint records under our own legal framework and control. The fact is that criminals and those wishing the British people harm come from all over the world, not simply from EU countries.

I accept that there might well be biometric data on foreign criminals in EU databases, as we have in ours, but surely it would be more sensible to build a database that we use to assist police forces around the world, with whom bilateral agreements already in place could be enhanced by such data-sharing. I am not against the concept of sharing data in and of itself, but the safeguards for those who could be wrongly identified and pursued by foreign police forces must be absolutely watertight.

I commend Ministers for the detailed specifications set out in the command paper about when a positive hit on a biometric should be progressed for handing over personal information. The fact that only the biometrics of adults convicted of recordable offences should be shared is a good safeguard. In the UK, however, we also hold the biometric data of juveniles convicted of recordable offences, of those arrested and charged but not convicted of many serious offences and of those whose cases have not yet been concluded. Again, my concern remains that while we intend to safeguard most of the UK data held from view by EU states through Prüm, we risk ECJ jurisdiction over our citizens’ data—as was said earlier, the lines are moving—when there are other options available to Great Britain’s police forces for accessing other countries’ records when trying to track down criminals.

The command paper states that of the 15% of crimes committed by foreigners, half are by EU citizens, and the other half are not. I know that every police force, anywhere in the world, will always want more tools to help them fight crime and solve serious offences. I was more than a little concerned by the shadow Home Secretary’s comments that security will trump civil liberties. I am afraid that that is not a view that I hold. There must be points at which we in this House determine the security of our citizens’ most personal biometric data, which must not be put at risk. We must retain complete control of our data records.

As a member of the Public Accounts Committee, I am also concerned at a practical level that the proposed cost of £13 million to build this portal to access British DNA, fingerprint and vehicle registration data is quite likely to be an underestimate. Since I was elected, I have sat in hearings week after week to listen to the justifications of Departments as to why IT projects have not gone according to plan or budget. The reality is that any new IT programme is fraught with challenges, but to build one that will need so many safeguards will undoubtedly be the cause of many problems, delays and unexpected cost increases.

I do not suggest that we should not be trying to build a portal of some kind to assist international law enforcers in the medium term to gain faster access to data, just as we see the benefits of accessing the data within other EU states, but I am not convinced that giving the green light to do this under pressure from states signed up to Prüm that are keen to get into our databases is the way forward.

I hope that Ministers will be able to assuage my anxieties on these matters for my constituents. I thank the Minister for giving me time to discuss these matters in detail last week. We have choices in how we go about increasing our biometric data sharing with other nations. I am simply unable to see why a rush to sign up to Prüm before new year’s eve is out is the right way to go. I will continue to listen to the debate and to Ministers’ honourable and considered positions on Prüm in the hope that my fears for both IT costs and potential failures will be proved wrong. I hope the Government will see that criminality extends beyond a few EU states in the complex global network that we all live in today.