Protection of Freedoms Bill

My Lords, before we go further with the fantasy of newborn babies being separated from their mothers to be swabbed, let us remember that all newborn babies have a pinprick test of their heels in order to get a blood sample for a Guthrie test to be sure that they do not suffer from a serious metabolic disorder—namely, PKU—and that these samples are retained. So a database, in that sense, exists. We should discuss the uses of databases rather than what exists or how samples are taken.