LONDON Only 33,000 of the 4.9m crimes British police recorded last year were solved as a result of a match on the national DNA database, police admitted on Tuesday.

However, Chief Constable Chris Sims, the England and Wales' Association of Chief Police Officers' spokesman on the DNA database, told British MPs it had played a much more significant part in the detection of serious and specific offences. He said DNA matches had played a crucial role in solving up to 40 per cent of detected burglaries.

Sims, chief of West Midlands police force in central England, was defending the rapid growth of the police DNA database in England and Wales, and the continued retention of DNA profiles of innocent people who have been arrested but never convicted of an offence.

He was giving evidence to an inquiry by the UK House of Commons home affairs select committee inquiry into the DNA database, which is the largest in Europe. Sims admitted there wide variations in the approaches of the 43 chief constables across England and Wales to requests from innocent people for the removal of their DNA profiles.

Keith Vaz, the committee chairman, challenged senior police officers over the “negligible” rate of DNA detections, saying this amounted to only 0.67 per cent of recorded crime.He also raised concerns that the UK government's latest crime and security bill, which will put the deletion from the database of DNA of innocent people on a statutory basis, may not reach the statute book this side of the forthcoming UK general election.In the face of such criticism, the Home Office minister, Alan Campbell, defended the record of the DNA database. He said it had played “an absolutely critical role in the fight against crime”.

The UK Equalities and Human Rights Commission said it had “grave concerns” that the British government's proposals to keep DNA data from convicted people indefinitely, regardless of the seriousness of the crime, remains incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.

The commission's legal director, John Wadham, said “Winning that fight (against crime) must not come at the expense of the violation of the rights of innocent people.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service