Law Enforcement Records

Monday 24th May 2021 Written Statements

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

Further to my statement to the House on the 18 January and a further written statement on 8 February (HCWS774), this is an update on recovery of the “No Further Action” records deleted from the police national computer (PNC) in error.

Today, I am confirming that the data that was wrongly deleted from the PNC, fingerprint and DNA databases has now been fully recovered. 100% of the deleted records has been recovered and returned to the affected databases.

Over 99% of the data deleted from the PNC was recovered within the previously announced timeline. The remaining records required manual insertion into the PNC, which is a more time-consuming process. Intensive work has been undertaken with our colleagues at the ACRO Criminal Records Office over recent weeks and I can confirm that this work is now also complete.

I want to thank the National Police Chiefs Council, ACRO and the engineers and members of staff across the Home Office who have worked around the clock to make this possible.

I know that members across this House have rightly been eager to understand the operational impact that this data deletion has had while the recovery effort has progressed.

To date, we are not aware of any law enforcement operations that were significantly adversely affected by this incident. However, further work is ongoing to help us understand the full impact now that the data has been fully restored, which is being led by the National Police Chiefs Council.

It is important to reaffirm that no records of convictions were deleted as a result of this incident, and deletions only related to records in cases that occurred prior to 2015.

As set out previously, mitigations were put into place to minimise the impact of the deletion of the data; those mitigations have been effective.

Key amongst those was the ability of the police to continue to conduct simultaneous searches on other unaffected law enforcement systems such as the police national database. Alongside this, the Home Office and our suppliers worked to make the incorrectly deleted DNA profiles available to policing and to reinstate fingerprint records whilst the full capability was being restored.

As well as the data recovery exercise, we have also taken steps to provide additional assurances on the PNC system since the incident occurred. This includes bringing in extra personnel for quality control and ensuring extra checks are in place on all work being undertaken. The Home Office has engaged intensively with policing to strengthen checks on any future updates to law enforcement systems. This includes the development and introduction of new processes and operating models to bolster the checks to ensure an error like this one does not happen again.

The Home Secretary and I commissioned an independent review, led by an external panel chaired by Lord Hogan-Howe, to investigate how this happened and to ensure the necessary lessons are learned to avoid similar incidents in the future. We are extremely grateful to Lord Hogan-Howe and his team for their work.

In line with the commitment made when this review was commissioned, a summary of this review will today be placed in the Libraries of both Houses.

The report confirms the minimal impact that the incident has had on police investigations as well as the criminal justice system more widely and will enable us to address the operational and technical failures that led to this error.

The review sets out a wide range of recommendations for both the Home Office as well as the police to address the underlying factors that led to this unacceptable incident. We have considered these recommendations very carefully and I can confirm both the Home Office and the police have accepted all the recommendations in full and work is already under way to take the necessary steps to respond to the recommendations.

Work will now commence on phase 4 of the recovery effort, which will aim to delete data which should have been deleted but erroneously has remained on the PNC as a result of this incident. I will provide a further update to the House on this work in due course.

[HCWS49]