Today’s news that the Home Office intends to ram through by statutory instrument a major and highly contentious curtailment of civil liberty by retaining the DNA profiles of innocent persons for up to 12 years, contrary to to an ECHR ruling, is not acceptable. The police currently hold on their database the profiles of 850,000 persons who have been arrested, but not charged or found guilty. Many of them feel they are being branded as criminals when they are not, and that retaining the profiles in these circumstances will simply discourage people from giving blood samples in future because they may be stigmatised as a result. There is therefore considerable public misgiving about this proposal as it is, but now to find a ‘safe’ route to push it through the Commons via a statutory instrument committee and thus avoid a vote of the whole House is both devious and cowardly. The Home Secretary should think again, not least when public anger is already at boiling point over MPs’ expenses.

What is so regrettable is that if the Government has a case, it seems so unwilling to make it openly. And the Government does at least have a case, if put with care. It is true that in the last few years a number of violent criminals have been trapped by DNA evidence, and nobody wants to diminsh the chances that this will continue to occur. Now those who are arrested for such serious crimes as murder and rape, but not convicted, may of course be entirely innocent or have been acquitted because the high threshold of proof required could not be met.
Obviously DNA evidence in respect of the former group should not be retained, but it is more questionable in the latter case whether it should automatically be discarded. Distinguishing one group from the other may sometimes be difficult, and rather than leave this to the police, maybe what is really needed is a specialist expert group who, against the presumption that DNA profiles should not in general be retained, would have the final authority to decide whether the evidence suggested it might be a wise precaution to retain them in certain specific cases. This would meet the objection of the Strasbourg judges that the current retention of innocent people’s DNA was disproportionate.
This is the case that needs to be made openly on the floor of the House and debated for and against. Sidelining it into an S.I. committee which is taken ‘upstairs’ and where the members can be handpicked by the Whips to ensure a Government majority does not inspire confidence. It is yet another example where the Whips’ control over committee membership can influence, if not actually determine, the outcome – a device which any decent Parliamentary reform would seek to break – but it is particularly inappropriate that it should be deployed here in an intimate matter touching the freedom and right to privacy of all citizens. Moreover, it is also surprising that Ministers are entitled to relegate a matter of such potential importance to the status of secondary legislation, and I intend to ckeck under what section of primary legislation this is permitted.

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