Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many times digitally stored photographs seized by police forces in England and Wales investigating online child abuse were checked against the National Crime Agency's Childbase electronic database of known abuse images in each of the last four years; and how many times that database was used by each police force in England and Wales.

The Childbase database is no longer live and ceased to be active in 2011. All forces have access to the National Hash Set Database which houses images seen and categorised by UK forces. We are developing a national capability for collecting, assessing and storing indecent images of children (IIOC) for law enforcement agencies. This capability will also be used to provide hash set data to the internet industry, to allow them to remove these appalling images from their networks. The child abuse image database (CAID) will be operational by the end of 2014.