Police National Computer

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I am very happy to give the noble Lord an update: last week the Home Office became aware that, as a result of human error, the software which triggers these automatic deletions contained defective coding and had inadvertently deleted records that it should not have and had not deleted some records which should have been deleted. An estimated 213,000 offence records, 175,000 arrest records and 15,000 person records are now being investigated as potentially having been deleted. It is worth explaining to the House, which I did not do before, that multiple records can obviously be held against the same individual, as the noble Lord will know.

On how we dealt with it, on the same day as the Home Office became aware of it, engineers put a stop to the automated process to ensure that no further deletions took place. All similar automatic processes have also been suspended. Earlier last week, Home Office civil servants and engineers worked very quickly to alert the police and other operational colleagues, and established a bronze, silver and gold command to manage the incident and co-ordinate a rapid response. The noble Lord will have heard me say to two previous speakers just what the process will be over the next few days.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I, of course, accept my noble friend’s assurances that this was human error. Indeed, human error has brought down the biggest and most sophisticated IT companies, such as Facebook, Google and Twitter. Nevertheless, this shines a light on the still creaking government IT procurement systems. I echo the comments of my noble friend Lord Dobbs. Is it not time to get departments out of their fiefdoms and working more effectively with the Government Digital Service to provide an IT strategy that is fit for purpose as we end the first quarter of the 21st century? We still have these fiefdoms procuring huge IT projects at vast cost and overrun which are not fit for purpose. It is time to centralise this procurement process.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, I do not know whether I am speaking as a Minister or not, but on a personal level I totally agree with my noble friend. A whole-of-government approach would be so much better in so many areas, but each department is very protective of the money it seeks from the Treasury. Perhaps in future we will begin to have much more of a common approach on technology and procurement.