Police National Computer

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

One of the things that I said in my early statements was that I had asked officials from the police to confirm to me their initial assessment about what risk was posed to the public, and we are awaiting the conclusions of that particular report before I can give the hon. Gentleman a categorical answer. What we do know is that these particular records that were deleted related to people who were released by the police with no further action. They were either arrested or under investigation, but for that particular crime they were what is called NFA. To a certain extent, that gives some assurance, but I am afraid I cannot I give him the full picture, possibly until later this week or early next week. I am fully committed to doing that.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con) [V]]

Can my hon. Friend confirm that those who are currently relying on police national computer data for investigations will be able to rerun their searches once the recovery work on the police national computer is complete?

[Kit Malthouse]

I can confirm that. The moment we have recovered the data and put things back as they were, and made sure that we have deleted the data that we should have deleted but had not, we will be encouraging police forces across the country to rerun their searches. It is worth reiterating what I said earlier, which is that there are other databases on which these searches can be run, and we are encouraging police officers and, indeed, working with the National Police Chiefs Council, to make sure that those mitigations are used as fully as possible by UK policing.