Letter from the Rt Hon Tony McNulty, MP,
Minister of State, Home Office to the Chairman of the Select Committee,
23 July 2007
DOCUMENT 5055/07—DRAFT COUNCIL DECISION
ESTABLISHING THE EUROPEAN POLICE OFFICE (EUROPOL)
You mentioned your concern that not all Member
States may be making full use of the Europol Information System,
and asked for usage figures.
As you may recall the Information System was
only established in October 2005. At the end of June 2007 around
40,000 "objects" (records) had been entered onto the
system but there is an ongoing process of review and removal to
"clean the data" with updates and data deletion to remove
unrefined and expired material. The Europol Management Board has
expressed its concern that the amount of inserted data remains
low and while several Member States had very little data in the
system others had expired data that needed to be updated or deleted.
Members of the Management Board have expressed a commitment to
increase the amount of data input into the Information System,
and believe that the introduction of an "automated data loader"
may help the situation.
In strict numerical terms the UK is not a major
user when compared to the data input by Genmany, France, Italy
and Austria but part of this is explained by the fact that about
45% of the objects on the Information system relate to forgery
of money (Euro counterfeiting). This makes easy comparison of
system usage by country problematic.
However, taking June 2007 as an example sixteen
countries input new material onto the Information System. In terms
of volume the UK was fifth behind Germany, Belgium, Cyprus and
Italy, but since it was not possible to identify the types of
material input volume comparisons become meaningless.
23 July 2007
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