It emerged yesterday that at least 400,000 pieces of information had been wrongly deleted from the Home Office-controlled database that is vital to policing the country. These are thought to include 213,000 offence records, 15,000 person records and details of 175,000 arrests. About 30,000 records concerning suspects’ fingerprints and 26,000 about DNA are also thought to have vanished.
It was during a purge of information which had to be removed that new coding set off a series of further deletions that should not have happened.
Dave McKelvey, a retired Met Police DCI turned private investigator, said: “This is a policing disaster of gargantuan proportions. The first question to ask is why did they not have a back-up so if the wrong data was deleted it could be easily restored?
“If they have lost DNA records as well then how many burglars and rapists could potentially never be caught?”
Last night Priti Patel said the data was lost due to “human error” and thanked engineers for working throughout the weekend to try to retrieve it.
A review had identified the problem and corrected it so it cannot happen again.
The Home Secretary said: “Public safety is the number one priority of everyone within the Home Office, and I would like to thank the data engineers working to restore these records.”
Sir Keir Starmer called for her to be in Parliament tomorrow and said: “We need the Home Secretary to take responsibility herself for this.”
A retired special branch detective, who would not be named, said it was unlikely actual DNA records were lost as they are held separately on the National DNA database. However, the PNC should flag up who has had a DNA sample taken with its unique barcode.
He said it was important to know exactly which “datasets” of information had been lost.
