Parliamentary Privilege

Debate between Baroness Royall of Blaisdon and Lord Campbell-Savours

Tuesday 11th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

I am very proud to be part of the usual channels. I am also acutely conscious of the need for gender balance. I am rather embarrassed by the fact that there is no gender balance on this committee. We have a very democratic system in my party and we ask people to put their names forward if they wish to serve on committees and we try to ensure a gender balance across committees. If, however, it were the will of the House that this should go back in order to find a better gender balance, I would have no hesitation in supporting that. It is something that I am very conscious of.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I wonder whether the Chairman of Committees could respond to the question raised by my noble friend Lord Grocott. If he feels that it is difficult, perhaps the Leader of the House could intervene and explain to the whole House what the position is.

Protection of Freedoms Bill

Debate between Baroness Royall of Blaisdon and Lord Campbell-Savours

Tuesday 31st January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, this amendment is my modest attempt to secure the introduction of a voluntary national DNA database. I suppose I could have introduced the amendment under the voluntary donation provisions in Clause 10; however, on reflection I decided to graft the responsibility for working up the arrangements for establishing such a scheme on to the functions of the National DNA Database Strategy Board. If the amendment appears clumsy, it is because I am not a lawyer.

During the course of a somewhat flippant area of debate in Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Henley, with a smile on his face, suggested that a special database should be set up for voluntary donors. I think he called it the Baroness Royall database.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

He did.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I put the same proposition more seriously. I am convinced that there is much support throughout the United Kingdom for the establishment of such a database. I have no evidence, apart from anecdotal evidence and conversations. However, I believe that many people out there would have no problem donating their DNA to such a database. The huge and undeniable benefit of going down the voluntary database route is that it would greatly help to take the stigma out of DNA retention and would help to develop public recognition of the benefit of retaining DNA. The bigger the voluntary database, the lower the level of stigma will be.

It is inevitable that over this century the state will hold more and more information in secure conditions. Better that the collection of such information be organised in a thought-out and structured manner rather than in conditions of panic when the state feels so much under threat that its only response is overreaction, with resultant confusion in policies on law and order.

We are slowly moving into a world where the measure of our freedom is dependent on our freedom to walk where we wish, live where we wish, travel where we wish, interact with others where we wish, transact where we wish and live longer without fear of assault on our person, our possessions and our civil rights. That will require some data to be held on us as individuals. I believe that there are many millions out there who are prepared to invest in the protection of their freedom. For me, the question is not so much the nature of the data to be held—I think that at the end of a national debate we can agree on that—but how we can arrive at a point where the public have swallowed their misgivings and reservations about the secure handling of data. As the former Metropolitan Police Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton put it in the Times two weeks ago:

“We are seemingly happy to attach biometrics to our passports—and therefore to our identities—but fearful of DNA. Our data-dependent society requires everyone to be ‘on the system’”.

As the senior judge Lord Justice Sedley put it in the Times on 6 September 2007:

“Where we are at the moment is indefensible. We have a situation where if you happen to have been in the hands of the police, then your DNA is on permanent record. If you haven’t, it isn’t … It also means that a great many people who are walking the streets, and whose DNA would show them guilty of crimes, go free”.

He went on to say that expanding the database to cover the whole population had,

“very serious but manageable implications”.

We then have the very interesting comments of Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys in his evidence to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee on 3 February 2010. Sir Alec was described by the chairman of the committee as the person who,

“invented techniques for DNA fingerprinting in 1984”,

and as,

“the person who … invented this course of genetics”.

Sir Alec fathered the scheme proposed by the Government in the Bill. It was he who called upon the Home Office to adopt the Scottish model due to his profound concerns over the operation of the DNA regime in England and Wales at that time. To be fair to him, I quote his response to Gary Streeter MP’s questions in its entirety, but briefly. Gary Streeter asked him:

“Do you think it would be fair if the police did not just keep the samples from the people they have arrested who turn out to be innocent but if we were all on the database? How would you feel about that? Would that be a better system than the current system?”.

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys replied:

“It would be a much less discriminatory system. I do not want to discuss the issue of discrimination against certain classes of our society, but it would get rid of issues of discrimination. I personally would be very uncomfortable with the idea that the police would have such a database. My vision would be of a parallel database … that would allow the police to keep their criminal DNA database and then one can image how those two could possibly interface. Very, very interestingly, the United Arab Emirates has agreed to go ahead with mandatory databasing of the entire population—and without any change in legislation, as far as I can tell. They intend doing that over the next few years. There is an experiment that is about to start which will greatly merit a very careful watch, to see whether it really does impact on criminal detection or whether it is seen by the UAE society as much more of a surveillance tool—which would be my worry, I have to say”.

This is the man who basically invented this whole science.

My amendment is but a tentative step down that route. The reference to “categorising of donors” is the move towards the parallel database. There are a number of questions that would need answers if we were to proceed with a voluntary DNA database. What is the cost to be? Who will pay for it? What is the scale of public support? What security arrangements could be put in place to protect such data? What arrangements could be made for the removal of data? Who would have access to the data? How would one categorise data so as to de-stigmatise the retention of data while allowing for the transfer of data between the various categories?

These questions would be the subject of inquiry, investigation and debate within the National DNA Database Strategy Board, which is what I am recommending in my amendment. I have used the board as a peg on which Parliament would place the responsibility for taking the whole enterprise forward. I beg to move.