The DNA records of innocent people should be deleted from the national database because the practice is illegal and morally wrong, the Conservative party said yesterday.
The shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, writing on guardian.co.uk, said that allowing the government to store the DNA data of anyone questioned by the police "represents an unacceptable extension of the power of the state at a time when this government is making the state far too intrusive in our society".
"The DNA data of around 5 million people is stored on our national DNA database," Grayling says in his article published on Comment is Free today. "Almost one in 10 of the population and a substantial proportion of those people have never been convicted of any crime ... Much of that data will be stored indefinitely - often against the wishes of those whose data it is
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That is an unacceptable extension of what is increasingly becoming a surveillance society."
