A news article on today’s The Supreme Court ruling that the current ACPO DNA retention guidelines are unlawful mentioned in passing that legislation on the retention of DNA was going to be part of the Protection of Freedoms Bill.

I had actualy forgotten about that particular Bill as it seems to have been such a long time since the announcement that freedom would be protected by legislation (a non-sequitur if ever there was one).

Interest duly sparked, I had a quick search and found that the Bill has been passing through it’s committee stage, that final meeting being just yesterday (17th May).

Reading through the minutes produced the following from Clive Efford, MP for Eltham, who manages to talk sense and also some bollocks in the same passage (emphasis mine) :

Clive Efford: The Government might want to consider at a later stage altering the Bill’s title to the protection of some freedoms Bill, or the give a little, take a little freedoms Bill. Our deliberations on all the clauses have demonstrated that there are consequences to these decisions. It is easy to write headline-grabbing leaflets on protecting freedoms, innocent people, children in schools and biometric information, but when we get down to the nitty-gritty, legislating has consequences.

We had a long debate on the retention of DNA and the evidence supporting six years and three years. We proved that retention for three years is justified, but there was no unequivocal evidence to prove whether six years is more desirable. We argued at that time that the introduction of a six-year period would allow us to obtain the empirical information that we needed to make a decision about the time limit. To whose freedoms does the title of the Bill refer, because people may suffer as a consequence of our taking this giant leap of introducing a cut-off period of three years for the retention of biometric details?

Consequences have driven many of the measures today. Looking back, the previous Government did not come in with the intention of retaining innocent people’s DNA, introducing control orders, or taking biometric details from children in schools. However, the consequences of events and public opinion forces certain decisions to be taken. As the years go by, I am sure that there will be events that cause the coalition Government to reconsider some of their decisions.

In one debate, we discussed the freedom of schoolchildren as young as three to defy their parents. There will certainly be a freedom for three-year-olds, but I am not sure that parents see that as a freedom, because the Bill will say to them that their three-year-old may defy them over that child’s biometric details. That is an interesting consequence of a freedom, and it calls into question the title of the Bill—whose freedom will it protect?—because we want to protect the freedom of parents to be parents, and not to interfere in such a way.

We have discovered that the protection of freedoms is limited in relation to CCTV, because only a small fraction of CCTV cameras are covered by the Bill. For all that we have heard the headline-grabbing statements about the intrusion of CCTV into people’s private lives and the extent of surveillance of people by CCTV, when we got down to the detail we found that the Bill covers very few of the CCTV cameras about which people are concerned. CCTV cameras in the hands of private organisations cause concern among the public, and not those in the hands of public organisations, which are more accountable for what they do with their information. But it is against the use of CCTV by public organisations that the Protection of Freedoms Bill seeks to provide protection.

We had a similar situation with the freedom of people to protect themselves from rogue parkers, because of the protection given to rogue clampers. I cited the example of the Cator estate in my constituency, where residents were told that they could no longer use a simple system of clamping to protect themselves from people causing great problems in their community. They are now unable to protect themselves in the way that they had done for some time without causing any of the problems that the Bill seeks to address. I know we all want to deal with problem clampers, but I wonder whether we have created a problem of rogue ticketers.

The Chair Order. The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent Third Reading speech, but I want him to confine his remarks to clause 107.

Clive Efford: It is the title that I am calling into question, as you will appreciate, Mr Streeter. I was about to draw to a conclusion, as I do not want to cause too much more embarrassment to the Government by pointing out how the Bill is not so much about the protection of freedoms as an alteration of freedoms, in giving some freedoms to some people and taking away others from others.

We also had a necessary but not earth-shattering change—the removal of the provision that allowed the holding of fraud trials without jury, which had never been brought into force.

The Chair: Order. That has nothing to do with the title.

Clive Efford: Well—

The Chair: Has the hon. Gentleman anything more to say about the title?

Clive Efford: Well, all I would say is that the Bill restored a freedom that had never been removed in the first place, so I suggest that the Government should reflect on the title of the Bill.

The Chair: Thank you.

And so the anticipated Bill seems to be heading in the direction of most of this Government’s announcements in that it promised much and will actually deliver a dog’s dinner of fiddling around the edges without actually introducing any substantial change.

The final highlight in the extract above sums it up quite neatly :

I do not want to cause too much more embarrassment to the Government by pointing out how the Bill is not so much about the protection of freedoms as an alteration of freedoms, in giving some freedoms to some people and taking away others from others.

We will just have to wait and see what the final outcome is but at this rate I won’t be expecting anything substantial at all other than yet more legislation added to the already tottering pile.