Police National Database: Facial Images

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Thursday 2nd March 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Scriven]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the storage of the 19 million facial images uploaded onto the police national database is compliant with data protection legislation.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, legislation gives police the power to take and store facial images from arrested persons. There has been no successful legal challenge to the retention of images on the PND on data protection grounds, but the Government acknowledge that there are privacy issues. The custody images review has now been published and makes recommendations for improvements to the retention regime.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

I thank the Minister for that Answer. She will know that the review published last week into the 19 million images held on the police national database was in response to a High Court case of 2012 that found that treating the images of convicted and non-convicted individuals the same was unlawful. How do the new rules in the review make it lawful when it states that the images both of convicted and non-convicted individuals can be stored and used on the police national database for 10 years?

[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.