UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 222-iii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

THE national dna database

wednesday 3 February 2010

PROFESSOR SIR ALEC JEFFREYS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 186 - 206

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 3 February 2010

Members present

Keith Vaz, in the Chair

Tom Brake

Mr James Clappison

Mrs Janet Dean

Bob Russell

Mr Gary Streeter

Mr David Winnick

________________

Witness: Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys gave evidence.

Q186 Chairman: Good morning. I would refer everyone present to the Register of Members' Interests, where the interests of all Members are registered. This is the third session of the Committee's inquiry into the DNA database. We will be hearing later from the Minister for the Police, David Hanson, and the Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Grayling. We are delighted that our first witness today is Sir Alec Jeffreys. Sir Alec, welcome. I declare my personal interest: obviously we are from Leicester, and you have at some stage attempted to take my DNA - I asked you to do this, to see how your system worked - and of course you were given the freedom of the City of Leicester - on my birthday, by coincidence. Thank you for coming here. Last May, you criticised the Government's proposals for retaining DNA on the database for up to 12 years for those who have been unconvicted and uncharged. In their latest proposals, the Government have dropped that 12-year period and suggested that DNA should be kept for a period of six years. Do you still stand by your concerns about the retention of DNA for unconvicted people?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: I do indeed. Even six years places England, Wales and Northern Ireland in a unique situation in the world. There is no other country of which I am aware in the world that would keep the DNA of innocent people for that length of time. Even Scotland does not. Scotland retains the DNA of innocent people in the case of serious crime for a period of three years, with an additional two years after judicial review. The nearest I can find to the England, Wales and Northern Ireland model is New Zealand, which recently enacted legislation to allow people to take DNA pre-charging. In terms of retention, I have not been able to find out the details there. Basically, no country is doing this other than our own country.

Q187 Chairman: You, of course, invented techniques for DNA fingerprinting in 1994. At that time, did you envisage that one day there would be a database with five million names, the largest in the world, as a result of the work that you had done?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: Absolutely not. If we roll the clock back 25 years, if there had been a suggestion then that I would be sitting here today debating why it is that we have roughly a million UK citizens, entirely innocent, residing on a database, I would have been frankly astonished, perplexed and deeply worried. And I still am deeply worried.

Chairman: Thank you.

Q188 Mr Winnick: Sir Alec, like the Chairman and other colleagues, I am very grateful to you for coming along today. The Minister of State is going to give evidence to us later this morning. When he was asked previously if he would have any objections to having his DNA profile on the database for years, his immediate response was that he would not object in any way whatsoever. What about yourself? Would you object if your DNA database was kept?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: If my DNA were to be put on the database, I would object profoundly against that. People have drawn analogies between fingerprints and DNA. There are a lot of fingerprints, obviously, held on databases. I would argue that DNA is fundamentally different. It is a highly intimate sample. Admittedly, mouth swabs taken during police investigations have been deemed to be non-intimate, and that is a procedural issue, but your DNA has incredibly intimate information about you. It is about as intimate as you can get. It carries information on who you are: your physical appearance, your behaviour, your character, your parentage, your ancestry, your disease liability. The police are retaining physical DNA samples from which, in theory, a lot of this information could be extracted. I am not suggesting for one second that they are doing that; I am saying the potential is there in the future. Even if you look at the DNA profile that is stored on the database, and that is the DNA profile determined from a very limited number of genetic characteristics, that still carries additional information, in particular family information. That is the whole basis for familial searching on the database. What advantage is it to me, as, I hope, an entirely blameless citizen, with no criminal record and no criminal record in the future, to put my DNA on that database? The best outcome would be that my DNA would sit there cluttering up a fridge somewhere, that my DNA profile would sit there cluttering up a database somewhere. That is the best I could hope for. The worst that could happen would be if some glitch in the database gave a false match to my DNA profile, bringing me into the frame of a criminal investigation, which could have very serious repercussions for me until that error was solved, or, potentially, leading to the inculpation of a close family relative; for example, a brother or a sister, which again would have very serious ethical issues within my family. That is pretty obvious. No, I would not volunteer my DNA on to the database.

Q189 Mr Winnick: The argument may be from ministers and others, and certainly from the police, that if you have not done anything wrong, why worry? If you are innocent, so be it, there is no reason to have concern. That is not my view necessarily. I am putting, if you like, the view of those who do want to store DNA on a database.

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: I think I have given two very good reasons why there is a risk to an individual of having their DNA placed on the database. I have a real fundamental concern here. I am not a lawyer, but I have always understood that one of the great foundations of English law was the presumption of innocence. We are now seeing a sort of presumption of "future possible guiltyishness, but currently you may be sort of innocentish." I find that a deeply worrying shift in the whole ethos of how the legal system operates.

Mr Winnick: A sentiment I share.

Q190 Tom Brake: Sir Alec, on the subject of false matches, ministers, and, indeed, maybe the Minister who is sitting in the audience at the moment, have said that there is only one chance in a billion of a false match. Do you recognise that figure?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: I recognise it as a rather gross approximation. The chance that your DNA is currently in a profiling system that would match mine is of the order of one part in ten trillion. Such match frequencies are not given in court: they are usually more conservative at one in a billion. That is, to some extent, a meaningless number. First of all, the one in ten trillion is about a million times less likely than you winning the National Lottery - okay? - but every week someone wins the National Lottery. If we look at the lottery of the national DNA database: you have five million players in there, and you are running the Lottery tens of thousands of times a year by doing searches across it, so even matches down to the one in a trillion level start becoming likely after that. More seriously, there are not just unrelated people - I presume we are unrelated - who knows? - DNA would tell us - but there are close relatives, so that one in ten trillion changes to round about one in 200,000 for brothers, and there are certainly many, many instances of brother pairs on that database. There is a risk of a false match in there. It is remote but it is not zero. I do have a very major concern: if there were one false conviction based upon an adventitious DNA match, the damage that could do to the public perception of the DNA database could be very serious indeed.

Q191 Tom Brake: Are you aware of how the probabilities of a mismatch will change. I understand that in 2012 DNA databases across all, potentially, European countries will be accessible, so that there will be not just be the five million that you are talking about but additionally people from other European countries, on their DNA databases, where presumably the probability of the potential for a mismatch increases.

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: That is certainly true. I know for a fact that that exchange of information is already occurring. Interpol has a protocol called Gateway. That is being done right now, and it allows for exchange of information between European databases. Yes, the bigger the database and the more surveys or screens or trawls you do through that database, the more and more likely it is of an exceedingly rare match coming up. There is at least one example of a completely adventitious but complete match on record. That was in the early days of the database, when there were only about 60% of the genetic characters being surveyed that are characterised now. It led to an arrest, and it was only at the insistence of the person who was the subject of the accidental match, who got independent DNA testing, that that false match was revealed.

Q192 Mr Streeter: You have explained that the greater the database the more chance there is of a mismatch. You have invented a new phrase this morning, "future guiltyishness", for which I commend you. Do you think it would be fair if the police did not just keep the samples from the people they have arrested who turn out to be innocent but if we were all on the database. How would you feel about that? Would that be a better system than the current system?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: It would be a much less discriminatory system. I do not want to discuss the issue of discrimination against certain classes of our society, but it would get rid of issues of discrimination. I personally would be very uncomfortable with the idea that the police would have such a database. My vision would be of a parallel database, of essentially DNA as a personal identity, so DNA identifiers for individuals. That would allow the police to keep their criminal DNA database and then one can image how those two could possibly interface. Very, very interestingly, the United Arab Emirates has agreed to go ahead with mandatory databasing of the entire population - and without any change in legislation, as far as I can tell. They intend doing that over the next few years. There is an experiment that is about to start which will greatly merit a very careful watch, to see whether it really does impact on criminal detection or whether it is seen by the UAE society as much more of a surveillance tool - which would be my worry, I have to say.

Q193 Chairman: We are not going to visit Dubai to check this. I am not familiar with the population of the UAE.

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: Five million.

Q194 Chairman: In fact the size of our current database?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: Yes.

Q195 Mrs Dean: We have heard that most cases in which DNA evidence proved useful in identifying perpetrators related to burglary. I know you have said before that you could not see any advantage for innocent people of keeping DNA, but do you accept that burglary is deeply distressing for victims and some erosion of privacy is acceptable in order to convict burglars?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: Burglary is certainly very distressing. The impact of DNA on burglary detection rates has gone up substantially but I think you will find that most instances of detection through matches on the database are of repeat offenders. Yes, there may be an argument for extending the database to innocent people, but what I am not hearing is the balance between the ability to detect more crimes - which is, in a way, a trivial outcome of having more and more people on the database - and the protection of the rights of individual people perhaps not to be put on that database. I would stress that going on to that database is not emotionally neutral, in the way that having a fingerprint on entering the US or whatever is. Some people are entirely indifferent to going on the database; some people regard it as a rather cool thing to go on the database; some people are mildly concerned; some are deeply upset - and I have met some of these people - and there is one recorded instance of a suicide as a result of the shame that person felt as an innocent individual by being put on the database.

Mrs Dean: Thank you, Chairman.

Q196 Bob Russell: Are you suggesting that the unhappiness, shall we say, of innocent people who have their DNA on the police register should outweigh the justice in those few cases where DNA testing has found somebody who has committed a crime in the past?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: I am suggesting that a balance be struck. What I am not hearing is any representation of the rights of these innocent people not to be subject to this sort of distress from the perception of being branded as a criminal. That is my real concern. As I say, putting huge numbers of innocent people on the database will inevitably lead to more crimes being solved. A very interesting question is whether, if we took the one million innocents off now and replaced them with a million people picked at random from the UK population, the detection rate would be just as good. I have absolutely no idea at all. Also, I have seen no indication of how many of these cases that can be expeditiously solved by matches against innocent people on the database could be solved by other more conventional police investigation routes.

Q197 Bob Russell: Surely the police would need other information to support the evidence to bring about a conviction. They would need more than just a DNA match, would they not?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: Certainly, yes. There is no such thing as a conviction based solely on DNA evidence. There is always a context, but that does not change the fact that it may well be that these innocent people placed on the database are being used rather inefficiently to solve future crimes, and in a way that goes against their civil rights, I would argue.

Q198 Bob Russell: Following on from an earlier question from somebody else about the familiarity of DNA within a family, how does it narrow down if it is twins, particularly identical twins?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: If you have an identical twin, you have the ultimate alibi. That has happened in a number of criminal cases.

Q199 Tom Brake: Sir Alec, how easy is it to falsify DNA? I have been reading an article where a life science company which specialises in forensic DNA analysis claims that DNA evidence found at crime scenes can easily be falsified using basic equipment, know-how and access to DNA or a DNA database?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: I am aware that this evidence is in public, so I will be cautious in what I say, but, yes, it has been well-known in the field for well over a decade that a person reasonably expert in the arcane sciences of molecular genetics, and without a great deal of financial outlay, could acquire DNA from a person, replicate it and place it at the scene of a crime. But I would rather not say any more than that.

Q200 Tom Brake: Clearly you have very strong reservations about who goes on the DNA database, but assuming that we have one, are there any additional controls that you would like to see introduced that you think would, if not do away with all of your concerns, at least address some of them?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: Yes, get rid of the innocent people. It is as simple as that.

Q201 Tom Brake: If that measure were taken, you would then be happy with the DNA database?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: Yes. Let me make it plain to this Committee, I am an enormous fan of the DNA database. I think the original conception of an intelligence tool and a tool for catching repeat offenders was a fantastic one. I think the UK should be applauded for being the first country in the world to launch this. The original concept was wonderful. What I have seen over the years is this rather sinister mission creep, which, certainly in terms of the retention of innocent people's DNA on the database, has taken it away from that initial wonderful vision and demonstrably very powerful tool in the fight against crime into something that threatens to undermine public confidence in this wonderful creation of ours.

Q202 Tom Brake: Do you have any particular view about the DNA of children who are perhaps not innocent and whether their DNA should be retained indefinitely?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: This again gives me cause for concern. I do get a lot of correspondence, given my position; for example, a letter from the father of a 12- year-old who has been involved in a bit of a brawl after school - and I am sure many of us around this table have been in exactly the same position. Of course what happens now is that they are taken off down the police station, they are DNA swabbed and their DNA goes for a very lengthy period on the national DNA database. To me that seems disproportionate. I prefer the rather more old-fashioned approach of giving that person a jolly good ticking off rather than branding them as a potential future criminal. Children at school know about DNA. They are taught DNA profiling. They are aware of the implications. They will see this retention of DNA as something potentially sinister. It would be very interesting to do a review and survey of young juvenile attitudes to DNA retention. My feeling is that it is heavy-handed and disproportionate.

Q203 Chairman: As the person who, in effect, invented this course of genetics, you are quite clear that the guilty ought to be on the database?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: Unquestionably.

Q204 Chairman: Your concern is that the innocent, the uncharged and the unconvicted should not be on the database?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: That is absolutely correct.

Q205 Chairman: I do not know whether in your very busy day you have time to see films like Minority Report in which officers think they know when somebody is going to commit a crime. You are saying that this is in fact what the database is when they keep names of people who are innocent upon it, that these are people who may in the future commit but have not committed any crimes.

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: Yes. That comes back to my point about "future guiltyishness." What is the evidence that the pool of a million people who have been collected onto the database are enriched in future criminal behaviour? I am not aware of any evidence.

Q206 Chairman: You are pointing this Committee towards Scotland as a model of what we should be doing?

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys: I would be very content to see us follow the Scottish model of retention only in the case of serious crime and for a limited period followed by judicial review. I think they have got it right.

Chairman: Sir Alec Jeffreys, thank you very much for coming to give evidence today. This now concludes our inquiry into the database. Thank you so much.