Plans to give ministers wide powers to change the rules on how long innocent people are kept on the national DNA database have been deleted from the Policing and Crime Bill.
The Government intends to return to the issue in a new Bill next session, starting next month, following a European Court of Human Rights ruling last year that the present policy of retaining all suspects' data was "blanket and indiscriminate".
Junior Home Office minister Lord Brett explained tonight, during the Bill's committee stage, that the present proposals were being withdrawn in the face of criticism from peers and parliamentary committees.
Ministers had proposed allowing innocent people who are never charged to remain on the database for up to 12 years instead of indefinitely. But this detail would have been dealt with by regulations rather than primary legislation.
Lord Brett, accepting Tory and Liberal Democrat demands to delete the clauses, said: "We accepted the concerns raised by the committees. We accepted the concerns raised by the stakeholders. We accepted the strength of feeling in this House.
"Given that strength of feeling, we thought it was important to move forward if possible with consensus." He agreed that the issue would be "more appropriately dealt with" in a separate Bill.
Tory security spokesman Baroness Neville-Jones, while welcoming the change of heart, warned that it would delay yet further the UK's response to the European court's judgment. The clauses were then deleted without a vote.
