Protection of Freedoms Bill

My Lords, I rise with diffidence to support my Government, because I think that the issues are extremely difficult and that one has to balance very unalike aspects of our society and culture. I was going to say, until the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said it for me, that the logical conclusion to question of the retention of DNA, fingerprints and so on would be for the whole population to be required to give its DNA, fingerprints and so on. That has a simplistic appeal to it. The argument against it, however, is rather the same as the argument against there being surveillance cameras on every corner, in every street and in every lane—the same as the argument against intrusive surveillance through telecommunications. After all, if one could tap any and every conversation all the time, one would no doubt have another huge reservoir of information wherewith to convict criminals. I am also alive to the fact that if you stop 100 people in the street at random and ask them the Question on the Order Paper, I suspect that most of them would side with the Opposition on this, although I am not sure that dealing with such a complex issue is susceptible of that sort of polling. Let me emphasise that I do not for a second undervalue or underrate the pain, suffering, grief, sense of injustice and so on of a person who is the subject of a serious crime that is never resolved. However, one has to think, I believe, of the whole ethos and culture of our society and how far it defends privacy. This is a privacy issue, just as phone tapping is. Weighing the balance of one with the other, one also has to feed into the mix the psychology of what we are talking about, which is extremely difficult. Is a society that is at one extreme, which is subject to the full panoply of surveillance and the rest of it as a matter of compulsion, likely to be a different society from the one that we have? I would say that everyone in this Chamber would say yes. I suspect that few of us would be able to articulate quite why we would say that. At the end of this murky debate, I am afraid that I come down more on the side of the preservation of freedom and privacy than perhaps some who would come down more on the side of detection and bringing to trial. I can get no further than that, but it leaves me in support of what the Government are seeking to do in this Bill in this respect.