Just how far will the Home Office go to justify the retention of DNA profiles from people arrested but not found guilty of any crime?

Its Keystone Kops routine took another bizarre twist last night with the revelation that in a letter to a select committee detailing five successful prosecutions to justify its plans to retain innocent samples, one of the cases was a direct copy of another, with the names changed.

The letter was sent by Home Office minister David Hanson (pictured) to a committee scrutinising the Crime and Security Bill, Channel 4 News reported. But one member of the committee, Conservative shadow home affairs minister, James Brokenshire, noticed that two of the cases bore a striking resemblance. Under questioning, Mr Hanson admitted they were in fact the same.
 
The Home Office is claiming “an administrative error” which presumably arose when the cases were anonymised. But given that they were supposed to represent cases where convictions had been achieved with the help of “innocent” profiles, it is difficult to see why there was any need for anonymity. The cases, having been through the courts, were already on the record.
 
Mr Brokenshire told Channel 4 News: “The Minister has clearly provided information that is fundamentally incorrect. He’s saying it was an administrative error.
 
“Well at the very least it says gross incompetence in the preparation of evidence on such a sensitive and significant issue as DNA retention and its use in serious crime.”
 
It may be possible for the Home Office to make a sound case for retaining innocent profiles for six years, as it wishes to do. But at every stage so far, its efforts to justify this policy have been unconvincing. The best hope seems to be that with the arrival on April 1 of its new Chief Scientific Adviser, the distinguished statistician Professor Bernard Silverman,  it can raise its game to a level more appropriate to the seriousness of the issue.