Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of the permanent deletion of the Metropolitan Police's Gang Violence Matrix database on access to justice for people who were wrongfully included on the database.

The Gang Violence Matrix (GVM) was an operational intelligence tool used by the Metropolitan Police to identify and risk-assess individuals involved with gangs across London.

The deletion of the data held on the GVM is an operational matter for the Metropolitan Police as the data controller, and it is their sole responsibility to exercise their retention policies in line with the Data Protection Act 2018 and authorised professional practice from the College of Policing. The Metropolitan Police’s use of the GVM is subject to an enforcement notice from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). We understand that since the enforcement notice the names on the GVM have been under regular review, and since its inception in 2012 over 4,000 names have been removed.

Following the enforcement notice from the ICO, the Metropolitan Police made a decision that GVM data would be retained for a period of 12 months, from the date of decommission (13 February 2024), as there was no policing purpose to justify the continued retention of the data. This means that all data will permanently be destroyed on 13 February 2025. This decision was taken in order to satisfy Right of Access requests from persons seeking clarity on their inclusion on the GVM. Any individual that considers they may have been included on the GVM is therefore entitled to submit a Subject Access Request to the Metropolitan Police by 13 February 2025, and the Metropolitan Police advise the public of this on their website.

Additionally, the ICO’s enforcement notice already requires that the Metropolitan Police review their sharing of information with third parties and, as the relevant supervisory authority, the ICO have the necessary powers to enforce compliance with said notice.

The Home Office does not hold any data on individuals being charged, prosecuted or incarcerated based on information held on the GVM.

In relation to the transparency of the process by which the Police collect retain and use data, the Police are subject to the Data Protection Act 2018 and authorised professional practice from the College of Policing. However, as part of the Home Office’s police reform agenda we will explore how best to support policing in the collection, use and management of their data for a range of operational and analytical purposes.