John Wadham, director of Liberty:

"If the Government wants a national DNA and fingerprint database of all innocent citizens, and wants to treat us all as suspects not citizens, it should come out and say so - and have an open public debate.

If not, it should stop seeking new ways to put yet more innocent people on these criminal databases, where all the genuine criminals already go.

"If there is any significant evidence that someone is involved in a crime, these very personal markers can already be taken. This simply treats everyone who has ever been wrongly arrested as guilty by implication.

"The Government has often said that the vast majority of crime is committed by perhaps 100,000 people, all known and long since added to these databases. Why does it want to confuse the picture by adding more innocent people? That can only contribute to the danger of terrible mistakes" .