Our research suggests that the overwhelming majority of police forces are unable to separate the records of people never charged from those found guilty in court."

Since 2004, police forces have been allowed to take the DNA or fingerprints of anyone aged over 10 who was arrested for a recordable offence, which means most crimes.

The national DNA database grew to include details of several million people over the next few years, and was credited with leading to convictions as samples taken from crime scenes were linked to people arrested for unrelated offences.

In 2008 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that keeping the records indefinitely was unlawful, prompting the Labour government to review the policy.

After the election, the Coalition promised to improve the system by making it more like that of Scotland, where only the DNA of those convicted of serious offences, such as violence or sex crimes, is held and for a maximum of five years.

But it then emerged that ministers only planned to anonymise the records rather than deleting them completely, and did not introduce a safeguard that would mean a judges approval was needed to keep the files.

The Protection of Freedoms Act passed last month also allows biometric material from innocent people to be kept for up if it is deemed to be in the interests of national security.

Big Brother Watch claims it is not clear how citizens can have their profiles removed from the database, and that in the absence of detailed plans or a timetable from the Home Office, police forces are continuing to add to it.

Figures show there are now some 6.4m profiles on the database.

Records obtained through Freedom of Information requests by Big Brother Watch suggest that 986,767 samples of DNA were gathered between January 2009 and December 2011.

Continue reading here:
DNA of thousands of innocent people still being collected by police