Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether image data held by the Childbase database was transferred to the National Image Hashing Database; and whether international images of online child abuse identified by (a) the Internet Watch Foundation and (b) Interpol are placed on the National Image Hashing Database.

Childbase was a system to hold illegal images of children for the purposes of victim identification within the former Child Exploitation and Online
Protection (CEOP) Centre. The Childbase database ceased to be active in 2011 and is no longer live. The images held on Childbase were transferred to a standalone system in CEOP and no images or data was lost as a result of the decommissioning of Childbase.

The interim National Hash Set Database (iNHSD) holds hashes of images seized by UK forces. In 2012, at the inception of the iNHSD in Cheshire Police, all of CEOP’s images were transferred to it. The National Crime Agency’s CEOP Command has also contributed all of its images to the iNHSD. It is not possibleto say categorically whether any of these hash sets would have originated from Interpol partners or the Internet Watch Foundation.