Police National Computer

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, we need to get to the heart of what happened here, which was human error in the coding of a programme. As I said earlier, all the best IT in the world cannot prevent human error—it will happen. I am not in any way undermining the seriousness of what happened, but it was indeed human error.

[Lord Dholakia (LD) [V]]

My Lords, we are facing a sorry state of affairs in policing issues in this country. First, despite the introduction of 20,000 new police personnel, we learn that a large number of crimes are not reported, including one in four serious crimes in the Manchester police force. Secondly, we have lost records, despite a number of requests to renew our technologies in this area. My noble friend Lord Paddick asked a question on this. Have any discussions taken place with our EU colleagues about whether this deletion of records has any implications for proceedings in their countries?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I confirm to the noble Lord that this has no relation to SIS II, so our European partners are not relevant in this case, which is one of human error. The noble Lord talked about criminal records from Greater Manchester Police; it is terrible that crimes have not been recorded and followed up, which my right honourable friend the Policing Minister is incredibly concerned about.