§ Mr. RedmondTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement on the conversion of the national collection of criminal records into digital form for entry on the police national computer; and what steps he is taking to ensure that technical staff who have access to the computer do not have criminal connections.
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§ Mr. MacleanThe contract for the back record conversion of criminal records, for eventual entry on the police national computer, was awarded to PCL Group Ltd. on 5 July 1994. Work began in October and is expected to take 18 months. It is being carried out, under conditions of the strictest security, in three locations in the United Kingdom.
PCL Group operators do not have direct access to the police national computer but key portions of records on to magnetic tape from electronic images supplied by the national identification service at New Scotland Yard. The procedures for conversion make it impossible for workers to associate a subject's name with details of his or her convictions, since the different sections of each criminal record are separately streamed and only reassembled at New Scotland Yard on return of the magnetic tapes. After quality control has taken place, the converted data will be passed, again on tape, to Home Office civil servants at the Hendon Data Centre for entry on the police national computer.
All the workers keying in records have been subject to a criminal record check, as have all Home Office staff involved in this work.