http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=003986439041226&rtmo=aCau54uJ&atmo=rrrrrrrq&pg=/et/00/12/10/nkit10.html Electronic Telegraph, UK, Dec 10 2000 Roadside DNA tests planned By David Cracknell, Deputy Political Editor DRIVERS or other people stopped by police could be asked to supply on-the-spot hair or saliva samples to identify whether they are wanted criminals. Government scientists have developed a hand-held DNA testing kit to be carried and operated by police officers during regular patrols. The device would be electronically linked to the national DNA database, which Tony Blair has hailed as an essential tool in the fight against crime. The Forensic Science Service will disclose to Parliament this week that the equipment could be ready for standard use within a couple of years. The testing kit, which could become as common as the breathalyser or police baton, will dramatically cut the time it takes to match DNA evidence from crime scenes to suspects. It will raise fresh fears among civil liberties campaigners who believe that the pendulum has swung too far in the police's direction. Forensic scientists already expect that soon they will be able to use a single hair sample to discover a suspect's eye colour, facial characteristics, height and weight. They say that the next step will be portable testing kits that need little technical ability to operate. The FSS will give evidence to the House of Lords science and technology committee this week, telling peers that research on the kits is well advanced. It currently takes at least 48 hours to profile biological material collected from a crime scene, but the new kits could give police an instant lead if they were made standard issue. They would allow such tests to be carried out outside the laboratory for the first time. A spokesman for the FSS, which is a Government agency, said: "We feel that we have gone as far down the line as we can in terms of what a DNA profile can tell us about an individual and the next area we are looking at is speeding up the process." The Telegraph has seen written evidence to the Lords committee from one of the organisation's chief scientists, Dr Bob Bramley, and research documents. The committee began its inquiry after becoming concerned about the dramatic increase in the scale of DNA samples collected by the police. Earlier this year, the Prime Minister announced an extra £109 million for the expansion of the police's DNA database in Birmingham to include samples from "the entire active criminal population" - estimated to be around three million. The police have already collected nearly a million samples from those convicted of an offence that carries a prison sentence. Senior officers are now lobbying for changes in the law to allow further expansion of the database to include innocent people who volunteer to take part in mass screenings. Civil liberties campaigners are opposing any extension of the police's authority to to collect samples. They cite an official report which found that thousands of samples are being illegally held on the database because forces are failing to remove the records of acquitted suspects. John Wadham, the director of the human rights group Liberty, said: "The law already allows the unjustified collection of samples and we know that there are at least 50,000 being illegally held at the FSS database. This is not the time to relax the law."