Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)

My Lords, my Amendment 99 is not directly related to the previous amendments other than by the connection of biometric data. My question is about which database the biometric data is being checked against. The question comes from the briefing that was helpfully provided by the Minister and his advisers prior to the Bill being laid. At that briefing, I asked whether the databases were being checked for particular purposes, and the advice we received was that they could not be used by the police. I found that confusing when I re-read the Bill and saw that there is a law enforcement clause. The questions today are about whether the databases are being checked for these particular reasons. If the people you are checking are entering for the first time, they should never have their data in these databases because they have never been to the UK. But, of course, many of the people who arrive, sometimes illegally, have been here before, have left and now are returning—so it is important to establish their identity first, obviously. The databases that I am interested in are, first, the unsolved crime scene database. Crimes happen every day, samples are taken—DNA, fingerprints and sometimes photographs now—and, of course, not all crimes are solved. A database is kept of those crimes that are not solved, so is the biometric data of the people who are entering being checked against that? The second group I am interested in is people who are wanted. They might be wanted in this country or in other countries. It may be that we choose not to let the third country know that this person has arrived, but at least we should know whether we are at risk of importing someone who is wanted somewhere else. This is probably quite important, given the group of countries that many of the people who are coming to our country are linked to. When many of our soldiers in Afghanistan were murdered and badly maimed by IEDs, we collected an awful lot of forensic material, which is now stored in this country in case we ever discover the people who carried out those crimes. It would certainly be ironic if somebody claimed to want to come to this country legally and had previously killed or maimed one of our soldiers—we should at least be aware of that. Are we checking this against that database? This is quite a specific set of questions, but it relies on the data being checked. The advice we received at the briefing was that it was not. The purpose of this amendment is to get on record exactly what it is being checked against.