Police National Database: Facial Images

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Thursday 2nd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, there is a presumption of deletion in certain categories—certainly for the under-18s, for those not convicted, as the noble Lord said, and for people who have been convicted of a non-recordable offence. These can all request that their images be deleted, but there are exceptions which I think are reasonable—if there is a substantive reason to believe that someone is linked to terrorism, if they are dangerous or if they are linked to organised crime. Otherwise, there is now an arrangement whereby people can request deletion.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I am surprised that there are so few photographic records available to the police. I should have thought that there was a good case for all passport photographs to be available to the police. Does my noble friend agree that given a conflict between fighting serious crime, particularly terrorism, and privacy, the British people would almost certainly regard the former as having priority?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My noble friend talks about privacy. If everybody was required to put their passport photographs towards a national database there might be a real issue with privacy. What the Government are trying to do, and my noble friend alluded to it, is to have images on record of people previously convicted of a crime. The custody image review is attempting to get rid of the facial images of those who are not convicted—and I include myself in that. If you have a passport but have not been convicted, I am not sure what benefit your photograph could be to the police national database.